Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Yahoo! Pipes: what they're good for

I've posted a couple of times about Yahoo! Pipes, but I thought I didn't have a personal use case. Pipes do things like:

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

Now that I've lived in the Feed world a bit longer I can see LOTS of uses -- especially in a corporate settings. One example is when feed categories (streams, tags, labels etc) have their own feeds. Then one can combine well tagged posts from multiple sources into a single feed.

For example, in a few minutes, without reading any documentation, I merged two of my blogs into a single Pipe feed [1].

Now that's cool.

It would be much cooler if Google's Blogger supported category-specific feeds, but they don't. Other blog tools do better, I hope Blogger eventually joins the 21st century.[2]

[1] Pipes couldn't auto-discover the Blogger Atom feeds, I had to enter them directly.

Update 3/4/08: Oops. Blogger can do "label feeds" , but the capability isn't exposed in the templates I use -- not sure it's in any template. I'll have to explore a bit more.

1 comment:

  1. I did some heavyweight feed splicing using Pipes a while back. For my purposes, though, FriendFeed ended up doing what I really needed with far less overall work.

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