We learnt a little bit about web-feed as a warm-up session towards understanding Yahoo Pipes. Now let see what yahoo pipes is all about and how it can be put to use by an average blogger / web developer However an advanced developer can work as far as his logical imagination can take him
Yahoo Pipes – Its a A Feed Aggregator
Yahoo Pipes is a Web-Application by Yahoo… That allows the users to create their own aggregation of feeds without any sort of coding. Yahoo Pipes uses a Graphical-User-Interface allowing users to Drag-Drop controls
Basics – for the Average Joe / Jane
As a blogger, I presume certain subjects / people interests you more than the other .so you would like to keep a track of upcoming posts on those areas among your blogging circle of friends. In this fast paced world.. we do not always have time to visit the entire list of friend’s blog .Subscribing to their blogs will put an update in your inbox when a new post is made.. But then with the friends list growing lengthier by the day.. you would also not prefer to see your inbox bombarded with updates alone.
So to save you all the trouble you can create a yahoo-pipe (Create a Basic Yahoo Pipe) specifying the Web-feed URL of the respective blogs/websites ..where in the results are manipulated ( as you wish) ..say.. within a date range.. only top-15 results – sorted in ascending/descending order… displaying just the title only or along with the description …just about anyting you can think of…You can also perform custom search ..and manipulate the results
Once you are satisfied with the results of the pipe you have created you can now use the Web-feed-of-your-pipe into your blog by either directly giving it in the feed-widget of blogger ( this displays only the top 5 results by default)…. or convert Web-feed-of-your-pipe into a script code ( Using Yahoo Pipe in Blogs ) and insert that code into the HTML/JavaScript widget of blogger and see exactly the same result as you would see when you execute the pipe
If you are the more adventurous type.. you can configure your pipe such that it can take input ( URL / text / dates..etc etc) and execute them to give the concerned results
Moreover… if you have the appropriate fonts installed you can use the pipe to retrieve data from blogs/ website in other languages as well ( In my Sample Pipe I have used the Rss of English – Tamil – Hindi Blogs)
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