Using Yahoo! Pipes

Question

Have you used pipes.yahoo.com to quickly and easily do... anything? I've recently created a quick mashup of StackOverflow tags (via rss) so that I can browse through new questions in fields I like to follow.

This has been around for some time, but I've just recently revisited it and I'm completely impressed with it's ease of use. It's almost to the point where I could set up a pipe and then give a client privileges to go in and edit feed sources... and I didn't have to write more than a few lines of code.

So, what other practical uses can you think of for pipes?

Answer 1

It's nice for aggregating feeds, yes, but the other handy thing to do is filtering the feeds. A while back, I created a feed for Digg (before Digg fell into the Fark pit of dispair). I didn't care about the overwhelming Apple and Ubuntu news, so I filtered those keywords out of Technology, which I then combined with Science and World & Business feeds.

Anyway, you can do a lot more than just combine things. If you wanted to be smart about it, you could set up per-subfeed and whole-feed filters to give granular or over-arching filtering abilities as the news changes and you get bored with one topic or another.

Answer 2

One of my favorite things to do with Yahoo! Pipes is to aggregate multiple craigslist feeds into a single feed. You can make a feed out of any category or search criteria on craigslist. I live in a university town and am always on the lookout for tickets to sporting events, for example. I have a half-dozen craigslist searches all being combined into a single feed via Yahoo! Pipes. This works a lot better for me than simply monitoring the entire "Tickets" category; filters out most of the tickets I am not interested in. Yes, this is another aggregating feeds example, but the craigslist usage is quite valuable with the ability to aggregate feeds that are themselves based upon searches.

Answer 3

The one thing I have really used Y! Pipes for (rather than just playing around with it) is to clean up item titles, merge and finally de-dupe the feeds I got from querying multiple blog search engines with the same search term. This is something I’ve done in several very different contexts, eg. for my own ego surfing, in another case for the planet site set up by some conference’s organisers to keep an eye on their conference’s buzz, etc. Highly recommended.

Answer 4

well pipes are real fast and usefull. your version is also a very effective use of pipes others might be :

1) combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it.

2) geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.

3) power widgets/badges on your web site.

4) grab the output of any Pipes as RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats.

and many more...its all on ur innovation.

Answer 5

I've used Pipes to translate blogs into English. I would have liked to use it to fetch the full text for blogs which only provide a summary of the content in the feed, but unfortunately they don't provide any input which fetches the content from a parameterizable source :-(.

Answer 6

You can do tons of things with pipes. For example for sites like digg or reddit, you can make one to bypass the site and go directly to the linked article (rewriting the RSS).

I like also to filter webcomics' feeds to keep just the comics, and then mix them all in only one feed

Answer 7

I've taken the liberty of copying your pipe and rearranging it a bit so that it's easier to add and remove tags:

Yahoo Pipe: StackOverflow Merge Tags

Tags are now listed in a string builder, so to add a tag you just have to hit the + button on the string builder and type in the tag preceded by a slash.

Answer 8

Just stumbled on this while looking for ways to connect Excel to Pipes. A bit necromancer-ish, but here goes.

One thing I've done, is take an HTML page (science data) which has links to tons of CSV files for a bunch of Army Corps measurement stations. Each station has a big table of datafiles, all organized individually by month and year. I use YQL to parse out and organize the links to the individual CSV files in a way that Pipes can read them. Then, I use that as input into a Pipe, which has a user input for "Station" and "Date."

Using this, I can go to the Pipes page, type in those values and get the values only for a specific station and date, rather than have to find the station on a website, find the year and month in a big table, click the link, open the CSV file, and find the values for a day within that month's worth of data. I can even change the pipe to specify the hour, and the parameter, and then get a single value returned.

Now, I wish I could figure out how to program Excel so that I can use "=yahoo_function(station, datetime)" to place that value automatically into a cell give the values of other columns!