Yahoo Pipes allows you to take RSS Feeds (Website summaries) and combine , filter, sort and otherwise manipulate them according to what you need. This sample shows you how to do this, based on several feeds from the Iona website. The feeds we are going to combine are:
IONA Information, News and Events
Keep on top of the latest IONA news, events, class schedules and more
Debbie Moynihan’s blog
Open thoughts about open source, open standards, and lots of other random stuff.
Eric Newcomer’s blog
SOA, Software Standardization, Web Services, and Transactions
Oisín Hurley’s Weblog
SOA, Eclipse Tools, Open Source and SCA
Publicly Speaking
Rob Morton’s Weblog
IP Babble
William Henry’s Weblog
SOS
Services in OpenSource
Essence is Real
Kiyoshi Egawa’s Weblog
If you want to see the end result (all the Iona Dublin Feeds in one place), click here.
Disclaimer: I have no connection to Iona, but I do want to read all their Bloggers feeds in one place.
Yahoo Pipes in 10 Easy Steps.
1. Open your web browser and Login to Yahoo Pipes at http://pipes.yahoo.com/. You can use a standard Yahoo ID (e.g. from Flickr, or Yahoo IM)
2. Click ‘My Pipes’ on the top left of the page . You should see the following screen
3. Click on ‘Create a New Pipe’. It should be in the middle of the screen towards the top. You should now see something like the following
4. At the top left of the screen is a blue menu option ‘Sources’ , with a couple of different places we can pull information from (e.g. The results of a Yahoo Seach, A Google Base Search, Flickr Photographs). The one we’re interested in is ‘Fetch’ , which can pull information from any Web Address (url).
Drag and drop the ‘Fetch’ box into the ‘grid’ area on the right. The main part of your screen should look something like the following:
5. Now we will add the Web Addresses (URL’s) that we want to pull the information from. We’ll get these from this page on Iona’s web site. Luckily, the blogs / web pages we want to combine also come in the RSS format (the orange buttons on this page). All blogs and many web pages have this ‘RSS’ option, and it makes it easier to combine the information in pipes.
To find the URl, we right-click on the orange button on the IONA site, and select ‘Copy Link Location’.
6. Back in Pipes Again , we paste this RSS link into the ‘url’ field on the Fetch box. We also click the ‘+’ sign at the top left of the box, so that pipe gives us the option to enter a 2nd URL. Our Fetch box now looks like this:
.
7. We repeat step 6, and copy the 8 other RSS feeds into our fetch box.
8. At the bottom of the Fetch box there should be blue circle. Drag this blue circle and drop onto the ‘Pipe Output’ box. Your screen should now look something like this.
.
9. Clicking on ‘Pipe Output’ (grey tab at bottom left of screen) fetches the information that we have just selected. The output from your newly created pipe should be at the bottom of the screen and look something like this :
10. That’s it! We’ve created a Pipe. To allow the world to see your new create, Select ‘Save’ then ‘Publish’ (both grey tabs on the top right of the screen). We’ve published a cleaned up version of the Iona Feed for you to view at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/KIwiFt282xGelck8mLokhQ
