My First Pipe

Jim was talking about Yahoo Pipes on his blog yesterday, and rightfully pointed out that the application in “completely unintuitive” and “user-unfriendly.” In case you’re wondering what Yahoo Pipes is, here is a quote from searchviews blog, which gives you some idea (click here to read the whole thing):

“Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built in filters, and apply simple programming tools…It can extract dates and locations and what it considers to be “text entities.” You can solicit user input and build URL lines to submit to sites. The drag and drop editor lets you view and construct your pipeline, inspecting the data at each step in the process. And of course, you can view and copy any existing pipes, just like you could with shell scripts and later, web pages.”

Never being one to shy away from a challenge, I went and built three Pipes myself. They are called Intelligent Reads, Fresh Faith, and Christian Science Monitor. Intelligent Reads contains feeds from The New Yorker, The New Republic, the NY Times Magazine, Harpers and The Village Voice. Christian Science Monitor contains feeds from the various sections of that award-winning publication, and Fresh Faith contains feeds from mostly progressive Christian publications, including The Christian Century, Tikkun, Killing the Buddha and God’s Politics. Each of these feeds will have 25-30 articles at any given time.

You can access my pipe information page by clicking here, and you can go directly to any one of the three pipes by clicking on their names above. What you will see is headlines from the feeds of the various publications I have “mashed” together, along with (most of the time) a short snippet of the article. You can also view how I made the pipe, as well as subscribe to its contents in a RSS Reader, if you so chose.

Putting this together was not easy, but what ultimately helped a great deal was actually reading the instructions : ) Something we men are very reluctant to do most of the time.