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by Gina Trapani

As a prolific netizen, you generate lots of web-based feeds: your Flickr photos, your del.icio.us bookmarks, your weblog posts and your Lifehacker comments, to name a few. Instead of going here there and everywhere to see all the content you create on the web, combine it all into one master feed using with the newly-launched Yahoo! Pipes.

Sure, feed aggregators are a dime a dozen these days, but Yahoo! Pipes can filter and process feeds in lots of fun and useful ways, no programming required. Today we'll make a master feed of all your online activity using Pipes.

Fetch all your feeds

To get started, head over to Pipes and start a new one. If you haven't used Pipes yet, the interface takes some getting used to, but it's fun to work with once you get your head around it. Basically you drag and drop modules from the left-hand column onto the canvas, enter information, and then link those modules.

In order to get all your feeds, you're going to expand the "Sources" branch and drag and drop the Fetch module onto the canvas. Within Fetch, you'll enter each of your feed sources, one by one, as shown.

Click on the + sign to add more feeds. Here's what my fetch module looks like with the Lifehacker feed, my del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr photos, and personal blog feed.

Filter and sort

Now, here's the fun part. Using Pipes, you can filter, sort, and otherwise munge all those feeds you just fetched. Pipes offers some fancypants Flickr, Yahoo! Search, Local and other ways to process feed items, but we're just going to use the simple Filter and Sort.

For example, I just want to include the feed items from Lifehacker that have my byline in them. So, I drag and drop the Filter module from the left hand side. Then, click and drag on the dot on the bottom of the Fetch module, and connect it to the top of the Filter module. This is how you "pipe" the data from the URLs to the Filter.

Finally, enter your Filter criteria. For me, it was "Block all the items where the link contains lifehacker.com and the body does not contain the word 'Trapani.'"

Lastly, you want to sort the items by date so the newest stuff is on top. Things get a little dicey here, since different feed formats use different date attributes (like dc:date or pubDate), but we'll press on. Drag and drop the Sort module onto the canvas. Connect the Filter output into the Sort input, and define your Sort rule. I used a "sort by pubDate descending."

Preview your output

The Debugger, located in the bottom panel of the Pipes maker, can show you the current output of any module by simply clicking on that module. Once your pipe is complete, connect the last one - in this case, the Sort module - to the Pipe Output module. Select the output module to view the results of your handiwork in the Debugger, like so:

When you're satisfied, save your Pipe, and grab the permalink for it to view the results, and subscribe to the feed or publish it on your site. Pipe results are also available as JSON, information only you programmer-types will find exciting.

Check out the completed Pipe used in this example. Feel free to clone and base your own pipe on it.

Caveats and possible improvements

Now, after spending just a little time working with Pipes, you'll realize just how beta it is, and how many more features you want. For example, one thing I wanted to do for my master feed is prepend the item source to each headline, like "From Flickr: My cat" for a photograph of my cat. But, after wrestling with the Foreach modules for a long time, I surrendered - it doesn't look like a simple operation like that is possible. Yet. (Already more than one person has asked for it in the developer forums.)

However!

This pipe is an extremely simple example that only scratches the surface . While you can't do little things like appending a string to a headline, you can do big things like taking user input like zip code and turning it into a city and state, or doing dynamic searches in Flickr based on feed item content and matching them up with photos is possible. Pipes is powerful, and hopefully we'll see it expand, fill in the little holes and stabilize over time.

For more Pipes tips and tricks, check out the O'Reilly Radar's recent coverage:

• Yahoo! Pipes: Some Tips
• Yahoo! Pipes: Deconstructing a Pipe
• Yahoo! Pipes: The Modules For Building Pipes

Got questions or a good pipe to share? Hit us up in the comments.

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, would like to give the Pipes developers many candy hearts. Her semi-weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Wednesday and Friday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

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Maybe Eduglu is just a set of metapipes? LifeHacker gives a thorough howto for creating a personal überfeed from all of your separate feeds, complete with sorting and filtering.

Now, I'm off to play some more with Pipes...

ps. this was blogged using BlogBridge's cool new "blog this" feature. Slick.

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Maybe Eduglu is just a set of metapipes? LifeHacker gives a thorough howto for creating a personal überfeed from all of your separate feeds, complete with sorting and filtering.

Now, I'm off to play some more with Pipes...

ps. this was blogged using BlogBridge's cool new "blog this" feature. Slick.

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Naturally, the first thing I'd try to do with Pipes is to mock up something like Eduglu - taking feeds associated with a group of individuals and merging them into one place. The concept, from an educational standpoint, would theoretically make it feasible for students and/or teachers to monitor relevant online activities for an entire class, without having to hunt out each person's various feeds.

It's not quite there yet, though. Currently, the concept of Filters is rather borked in Pipes. If you're dealing with a homogeneous set of feeds in a Fetch, it works fine, but as you add different kinds of feeds, the parameters for filtering go all wonky (is it filtering based on Category? dc:topic? Title? Description? Something else?)

I've mocked up a too-simple version of what Pipes can do with a set of 5 individuals' various feeds (blogs, Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter). It's essentially unusable as an Eduglu, since there is no way to properly (and effectively) filter and/or prioritize items that are aggregated. And the display seems to be rather simple (title + one line of teaser).

Here's what the Pipe looks like from the inside:

And the output looks like this:

I'm going to be putting some more thought into what an interface might look like for defining groups, pulling in an individual's feeds, and displaying the aggregation. This is starting to feel like it's going to need some pretty high-end UI work on top of some pretty flexible plumbing to be able to do this effectively. 

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Naturally, the first thing I'd try to do with Pipes is to mock up something like Eduglu - taking feeds associated with a group of individuals and merging them into one place. The concept, from an educational standpoint, would theoretically make it feasible for students and/or teachers to monitor relevant online activities for an entire class, without having to hunt out each person's various feeds.

It's not quite there yet, though. Currently, the concept of Filters is rather borked in Pipes. If you're dealing with a homogeneous set of feeds in a Fetch, it works fine, but as you add different kinds of feeds, the parameters for filtering go all wonky (is it filtering based on Category? dc:topic? Title? Description? Something else?)

I've mocked up a too-simple version of what Pipes can do with a set of 5 individuals' various feeds (blogs, Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter). It's essentially unusable as an Eduglu, since there is no way to properly (and effectively) filter and/or prioritize items that are aggregated. And the display seems to be rather simple (title + one line of teaser).

Here's what the Pipe looks like from the inside:

And the output looks like this:

I'm going to be putting some more thought into what an interface might look like for defining groups, pulling in an individual's feeds, and displaying the aggregation. This is starting to feel like it's going to need some pretty high-end UI work on top of some pretty flexible plumbing to be able to do this effectively. 

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Developer Nick Bradbury used Yahoo! Pipes to generate a feed of YouTube videos based on the iTunes Store's top 10 songs.

Like Nick says, the feed isn't perfect, but it is a really great way to check out popular songs by gluing together the two services with Pipes. (What can I say? Even with its limitations, I love Pipes.) — Gina Trapani

YouTunes Pipe
YouTunes: An Example Yahoo! Pipe [Nick Bradbury]

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