Quickly: Merging RSS feeds with Yahoo! Pipes
Published 2011-09-20
I have only scratched the surface of what is possible with Yahoo! Pipes -- mostly working with merging RSS feeds -- but what I have found thus far is encouraging.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, this walkthrough is taken from here and here, with some added insights from my experience.
- Head to the Pipes site here and login.
- On the left, you have various modules in various categories to choose from. We're keeping it simple, so grab the "Fetch Feed" module. In fact, since we will be combining RSS feeds, grab a couple.
- Go ahead and paste your RSS feeds into the modules.
- To join them, zip down to the Operators modules and grab the Union module. This will take our three feeds and combine them.
- Let's say you only want items with tornado in the headline. Well, you can filter the feed data using the Filter module, found in the Operators modules list. Simply add the parameters you'd like.
- When you're ready to grab the combined feed, save your pipe and hit run. From there, you can subscribe to the feed, grab the com bined RSS or grab the data as JSON.
- Want to sort your feed? Add the Sort module. Want to Truncate your feed? Add the Truncate module. Want to do backflips by re-writing feeds to include images from Flickr by using regular expressions? Well, read this.
That's just a quick and simple operation using Pipes. With all of the modules available, creating complex data functions is only a matter of dragging and dropping... and a little bit of learning...