Flashes of Panic

I’m late to the party on this one, I suppose, but I recently discovered the coolness which is Yahoo! Pipes, and I feel the deep, geeky need to share.

I’ve read about Pipes for months (I even hinted about building one here) but I really only came to find them—and see how easy they are to use—a week or so ago. I’d been putting together a bunch of feeds for Common Kitchen, and the nature of their creation meant I had a feed which had cookbook objects, a feed with recipe objects, etc., but it was very difficult to create a feed with different kinds of object. So, in order to put together a “unified feed” with everything that’s new on Common Kitchen—a concatenation of the existing feeds—I turned to Pipes.

Pipes let me take the five or six feeds of interest, slurp them all into one big blob, sort it by date, then truncate the result to a reasonable length. Presto: a unified feed.

Intrigued, I built a similar pipe which combines most of the feeds linked from this weblog: the main site feed, the comments feed, my Flickr photostream, and my del.icio.us bookmarks feed. One feed to rule them all, one feed to bind them…

But Pipes are good for more than just combining feeds. Say you’ve had enough of reading my ramblings on technology that’s so last month (or, what’s a feed, again?) or folk singers with horn sections, and you just want to read what I have to say about running. I wouldn’t endorse such monomania myself, but it would be pretty simple to create a pipe which filters out all but the “running” category.

Why “pipes”? Because in the Unix world, the “pipe” character—the vertical bar you get from shift-\ on your keyboard—tells the operating system to take the output of one command and “pipe” it into the input of the next. By chaining a series of simple commands with pipes, you can build complex and powerful operations. That’s what Pipes is doing: allowing several simple operations on data to be chained into a powerful system.

(Tell me again: what’s a feed and why should you care?)

Now Playing: Fighting In A Sack from Chutes Too Narrow by The Shins

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