Feed Mashing 101
Talk about buzzwords. I recently decided to try to be a bit more productive with my online research, feed reading, blog surfing, and all those other things that really take up all my time when I should be actually writing! Anyway I decided that reading x number of blogs a day flipping back and forth between this window and that, reading this bit from a feed then that bit, and trying to find which ones actually had viable content was just beyond the scope of my abilities. Therefore, I decided to look for a way to mash them all together and make it a much simpler affair.
Yahoo Pipe
Is that anything like water pipe or bong pipes? No now, stop trying to distract me! If you have not heard of Yahoo Pipes then you are most certainly missing out. Yahoo Pipes are the easiest way to sort through all the flotsam that invades our daily online lives and find what we are actually looking for. Forget trying to manage twenty reader windows, checking out all your favorite feeds for the latest dish or that little coding secret that has eluded you. How? Easy just follow along.
Ok say you have two feeds (yeah like who only reads two feeds!) and being the lazy, I mean time conscientious person you are you would really like to get pull both those feeds into one stream. Have you ever noticed how so many tech terms deal with food? Feeds and their resulting streams? Ok maybe it is just me. Back to the example.
The Goal:
Take two feeds and turn them into one stream sorted in reverse chronological order.
Feed Mashing 101
Enter Yahoo Pipe. To accomplish the task we need to start with a very basic pipe and then we can just experiment until our little geek hearts are content. Now do not be put off but in order to accomplish our goal we need to do a few things. It really is just some straightforward logic:
1. Get your two (or more) feeds. For simplicity just grab the RSS feed links. Don’t have any? Ok then feel free to use ours.
2. Mash the two feeds into one stream.
3. Sort the stream. We are going to use reverse dates but you can use just about anything.
4. Output the stream as a new RSS Feed.
Sounds easy right? That is because it is. Before you go any further I suggest you open Yahoo Pipes in a new window. Then you can follow along with the example and build your pipe at the same time. As we go through the tutorial, I am going to assume some familiarity with Pipes. If you have not yet played around with Pipes then I suggest you take a few minutes and run through the “Learn How to Build a Pipe in Just a Few Minutes” tutorial.
Step 1. Fetch Feed
This module is where we will input the actual URL’s for the feeds we want to get. This Pipes module also performs the mashing part in case you were wondering why you only had 3 steps and 4 pieces of logic. Feel free to use these if you want to experiment: LifeIsRisky.Com (http://feeds.feedburner.com/LifeIsRisky)
An Unsuspecting Notebook (http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnUnsuspectingNotebook)
Step 2. Sort
Sorting can be done in lots of ways with pipes, for our little tutorial, we are going to use the basic old variety of sort, reverse chronology (dates).
Step 3. Output
The product, at least for this simple tutorial is the combined and sorted string.
Want to try running the tutorial Pipe? Feel free! Just click on the Feed Mashing 101 to pop over and run the tutorial pipe.
I would really like to know how everyone feels about this tutorial. If you found it useful and are interested in exploring this cool new gadget let me know and I will do a tutorial or three on more advanced pipes.