Yahoo! Pipes

Munging, Mixing and Mashing

A beginner’s guide to using Yahoo! Pipes by Neil Crosby .

I <3 Pipes

Easy to use.

Allows output in multiple formats.

Reduces the code I need to write.

“But Pipes isn’t easy”

It is, once you’re past the initial learning curve.

But that initial curve puts lots of people off.

Pipes powers my stuff

NeilCrosby.com

Following Twitter Conversations.

Making Feverº more useful to me.

NeilCrosby.com

What to talk about?

First, a simple teaser pipe.

Next, munging data together.

Then, filtering data out.

Finally, making new data.

1. A simple teaser pipe

Grab an RSS feed.

Truncate it.

Output it.

The Pipe

2. Munging data together

The Problem

You have a lot of feeds.

You only want one feed.

You want them in chronological order.

You don’t want too many items.

The Solution

Load the feeds using Pipes.

Sort the feeds.

Truncate the final feed.

Job done.

The Pipe

screenshot

3. Filtering Data Out

The problem

Upcoming provides a list of all events you’ve ever been interested in.

You just want the ones you’ve been to.

You only want the last few.

What to do?

The solution

Load Upcoming data as XML.

Filter to only keep “attended” events.

Turn Upcoming data into an RSS feed.

The Pipe

4. Creating new data

Twitter conversations.

The Problem

People ask questions on twitter that I want to hear the answer to.

The lovely answers are hidden from me.

The solution

Use twitter search to surface replies to the original question.

Create a feed from this data.

The Pipe

It’s a big’un.

(and this doesn’t cover all of it)

And there’s more!

Use YQL.

Use your pipes inside your pipes.

Post data to webservices.

Linkies@NeilCrosby everywhere.

http://neilcrosby.com

http://pipes.yahoo.com/neilcrosby

http://www.slideshare.net/neilcrosby/pipes