Yahoo Pipes: Fundamentally Powerful RSS Processing

Yahoo Pipes has been out for a while, and I’ve been meaning to give it a try. Well, I finally did, and it is thoroughly impressive. Pipes is “a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” Basically, it allows you to mix and match RSS feeds and do all sorts of creative processing on them. You can combine feeds, or take parts of certain feeds and feed them through other feeds. You can even translate feeds from one language to another. Pipes allows you to do keywords, so that only entries matching a certain keyword are extracted.

The interface for Pipes is amazing. It’s like a regular application in your browser window. The “programming” of a pipe is handled through the graphical interface. It’s very intuitive and very easy to learn. You can watch a couple of introductory videos, which I recommend, and then you’re off and running.

My initial project for using Yahoo Pipes was to create a megafeed for myself. I wanted to combine all the random RSS feeds that are generated by the different blogs and services I publish and use. So I made a feed that has eight RSS feeds all feeding into one hopper. I then sort all the combined entries by date so that all the newest entries from whatever feeds are at the top, and then I cut it off at 20 entries. That’s enough back data, and it prevents the RSS feeds from getting too large.

The Daniel Stout Megafeed has the feeds from my various blogs plus my del.icio.us links, my LibraryThing bookstream, and my Flickr photos. It’s pretty awesome. You can subscribe to it here. So check out Yahoo Pipes if you’re interested in doing some post-processing of RSS feeds. It’s a handy yet very powerful tool that will change the way you think about online content.