4.4. Interact with RSS Feeds

Yahoo! has a service (currently and perpetually in beta) called Pipes. The Pipes service allows you to manipulate RSS feeds (like blogs), combining, filtering, and processing the results to create either a web page result or another RSS feed. It uses a web-based drag-and-drop interface to create “pipes” from one feed to another, borrowing the Unix command-line pipe metaphor. From a usability standpoint, it looks much like Mac OS X Automator, where each of the commands (or pipe stages) produces output to be consumed by the next pipe in line.

For example, the pipe shown in Figure 4-1 fetches the blog aggregator from the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference site that includes recent blog postings. The blog postings occur in the form of “blog author - blog title,” but I want only the author in the output, so I use the regex pipe to replace the author-title with just the author’s name.

Figure 4-1. Regex pipes in action

The output of the pipe is either another HTML page or another RSS feed (the pipe is executed whenever you refresh the feed).

RSS is an increasingly popular format for developer information, and Yahoo! Pipes allows you to programmatically manipulate it to refine the results. Not only that, Pipes is gradually adding support for harvesting information off web pages to put into pipes, allowing you to automate retrieval of all sorts of web-based information.