Ever since I started this Blog I’ve always wanted to have a custom RSS feed bringing dynamic content to my site.

I always thought though that it was never going to be easy.

Even though I’ve always wanted one, putting one on my Blog has been gradually falling down the To-Do list until today, when I discovered Yahoo Pipes.

I couldn’t resist diving into using them today or at least trying to find out what they were all about and more importantly if I’d be able to fathom out how to use them.

I should have held off

I really did have better things to do today, but fools rush in where angles fear to tread as they say.

I got sucked in because at face value they seem to be fairly simple to use, and to be fair, its like a lot of things like this, once you’ve got past its quirkiness it is fairly easy to operate and plug things together.

The main thing of course is how to make the modules you’re plugging together do something useful.

Putting a simple pipe together is Easy

As is converting the pipe into what they call a Yahoo Pipe Badge, which is basically giving you the code to embed the feed on your site or blog.

This appears to be pretty much a plug and play approach for embedding it as a Widget in a Blogger blog or a Gadget in iGoogle.

Its not often that us WordPress bloggers miss out when it comes to automation, but at present we have to cut and paste the code, though I wouldn’t be surprised if someone out there hasn’t created a plug-in to help, if I go looking.

Making the pipe deliver what you really want less so

Here’s a snapshot of my first attempt:

I thought I’d fossilise it in this image rather than try and embed the real one at this stage, as I’m not sure if this early one will be around that long.

With any luck it will be because I’ve got a better grip on the pipes, (that sounds funny for some reason) so the later ones will be better and not because its all gone horribly wrong since this post.

I found it takes some working out to get close to the output that you want.

OK, I didn’t help myself by only dipping lightly into the documentation, training videos and example, when I got stuck.

So to be fair to Yahoo, I’m to blame for a lot of the wasted time.

However, that is one of the pros and cons of this interface

It looks so relatively simple to use, you dive in before you really know how to use it.

For example most of the effort went into removing the descriptions beneath the titles of each returned item.

As you can see, I wanted it to be just a list of related Article Titles, pretty much what you get back from Google, but with the descriptions stripped out.

But I couldn’t find any easy way to do it, even though by that stage I was looking around more for help and documentation.

So in the end I simply used a filter which blanked the description text, but I couldn’t get it to remove the line, which is the reason for the gaps between the titles.

It’s what I call a feature for now.

Time to wrap up this post

It was only supposed to be a quickie.

I’ve not gone into too much detail in this post as frankly having spent so long on Yahoo Pipes today and having got something that at least works and does a half decent job, I’ve pretty much run out of time.

It was really just to give my first thoughts and impressions on Yahoo Pipes as I came to the end of putting together my first Pipes Badge.

Things I still want to do

1. Make the Yahoo Pipes Badge look a bit better, probably by putting a decent frame around it.
2. Get rid of the gaps between the titles of each article.
3. Work out where I’m going to put it on this blog.
   I fell across the usual display differences between IE and Firefox, so gave up trying to embed it today.
4. Play with Yahoo Pipes more to see what it can deliver.
   I’ve a sneaky suspicion there’s a lot more go with this.

At some stage I’ll try and put together a few videos on what I’ve been able to to with Yahoo Pipes and any Tips & Tricks that I’ve learned along the way.

Meanwhile, I’d be really grateful if you could:

1. Give me an idea how to strip the descriptions without leaving a gap.
2. Provide some Tips and Examples on more exotic pipes.
3. Provide any CSS tips on how to layout the Yahoo Pipes Badge.
   So that it fits it in either of the two side columns.

A bit of humor...


Powered By WPJoke