Yahoo Pipes Podcast by Fast Wonder

I’ve been beta testing Iterasi’s PositivePress for a while and was excited to finally see it released to the public! It’s a great way to track and archive blog posts and articles from across the web while creating reports with links to certain articles that can be delivered to clients or friends. CNET did a … Continue reading Using Yahoo Pipes to Filter Results for Iterasi PositivePress →

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a 2 minute Yahoo Pipes video, but I had an opportunity to do a guest post on the Yahoo Developer Network blog (yay!), and I thought that a 2 minute screencast would be the best way to demonstrate my pipe. This 2 minute demo takes a series of keywords from a CSV file and uses Yahoo Pipes to run each keyword through various searches. This technique can be very powerful when you search multiple services, but I’ve simplified the process to make it easier to understand the fundamentals of the technique by running the list of keywords only through Twitter search. Here’s a quote about the technical details of the pipe from the Yahoo Developer Network post: Technical Details and More Information: The Demo Pipe. A copy of the Keyword CSV demo pipe – click “View Source” to see the modules. Fetch CSV Module. Enter the URL of the CSV file (make sure that it already exists in a publicly accessible location) along with information about column names and separation characters as needed. Loop module with URL Builder. Loops through each element in the CSV file and builds a search URL formatted for RSS output. In this case, we used Twitter search. Loop module with Fetch Feed. Loops through each URL built in the previous step and fetches the feed associated with the item. Sort Module. Sort by date in descending order to make sure things are sorted in a logical manner. Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe. I’ve created many Yahoo Pipes, and most of them have been published on my Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks page where you can also learn more about my Yahoo Pipes Training course on May 7th. Related Fast Wonder Blog posts Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks Introduction to Yahoo Pipes: A 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo Quick Vanity Feed: 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo Yahoo Pipes for Social Media Monitoring and Business Benefit Power (and Pain) of Yahoo Pipes for RSS Aggregation

This video shows how to use data from Google Docs as an input into Yahoo Pipes. In a previous video, I showed how to use a list of items in a CSV file. If you haven’t already watched the CSV input demo, you should start with it, since this pipe builds on the previous one. A CSV file is a great choice when you want to fetch a bunch of feeds and change them frequently without having to update your pipe, but a Google Doc is a great choice for when you want to easily update inputs to the pipe without needing to update a file on a webserver. More Details The Demo Pipe. A copy of the Using Google Docs Inputs in Yahoo Pipes Demo click “View Source” to see the modules. Fetch CSV Module. Enter the URL of a Google Spreadsheet that has already been published as a web page and append &output=csv to the end of the URL. Here is the example we used in the video. Loop module with Fetch Feed. Loops through each element in the CSV file and fetches the feed associated with the item. Filter Module. Filter by a couple of keywords. Sort Module. Sort by date in descending order to make sure things are sorted in a logical manner. Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe. I’ve created many Yahoo Pipes, and most of them have been published on my Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks page where you can also learn more about my Yahoo Pipes Training courses. Related Fast Wonder Blog posts Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks Introduction to Yahoo Pipes: A 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo Quick Vanity Feed: 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo Yahoo Pipes for Social Media Monitoring and Business Benefit Power (and Pain) of Yahoo Pipes for RSS Aggregation

Yahoo Pipes can make it easier to work with location data (latitude / longitude) across multiple RSS feeds, even when the original feeds have different ways of specifying the location data. In this demo, I’ll show you how to use the Location Extracter module to normalize the data and then filter on lat / long data to get results only within a certain area. More Details The Demo Pipe. A copy of the Using Location Data: 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Demo pipe click “View Source” to see the modules. Fetch Feed. In this example, we will use a feed from Shizzow containing information about places and a feed from the USGS with earthquake data. Both store their lat / long data in different ways within the RSS Feed. Location extractor. This module is atypical, since it takes no parameters and has no user configurable elements. It simply looks for lat / long data and saves what it finds as y:location.lat and y:location.lon. Sort. Sort by date (descending) to make sure that the output from your various source feeds appears in sorted order. Filter. We then filter the source feeds to include only the entries located in the western part of the United States (25 < latitude < 50 and -130 < longitude < -115). Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe. I’ve created many Yahoo Pipes, and most of them have been published on my Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks page where you can also learn more about my Yahoo Pipes Training courses. Related Fast Wonder Blog posts Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks Introduction to Yahoo Pipes: A 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo Find Flickr Comments by Tag Using YQL in Yahoo Pipes Yahoo Pipes for Social Media Monitoring and Business Benefit Power (and Pain) of Yahoo Pipes for RSS Aggregation

After learning that Yahoo Pipes introduced a new module called YQL (Yahoo Query Language) last week, I knew that I had to find a way to work it into one of my 2 minute videos. YQL uses an SQL-like syntax for more powerful and flexible inputs into Yahoo Pipes; however, working it into a 2 minute demo was quite challenging, since queries can be complicated. I cheated a little by glossing over the query language and focusing on how to use YQL effectively within Pipes. Honestly, I’m never going to teach someone to use an SQL syntax without extensive training, so this 2 minute demo is really geared toward people with database experience or programming backgrounds. I also did a more complicated version of this pipe with a more extensive explanation that you might be interested in reading to get more details about using YQL within Pipes. More Details The Demo Pipe. A copy of the YQL: 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Demo pipe click “View Source” to see the modules. YQL. The query: select * from flickr.photos.info(20) where photo_id in (select id from flickr.photos.search(20) where tags = “igniteportland”). Selects 20 photos from Flickr with the tag “igniteportland”. flickr.photos.search is used to find the images, but it doesn’t provide much information about the images, so I ran it through flickr.photos.info to pull in more data. If you omit the (20), YQL returns 10 results by default, and you can set this number to something appropriate for your needs. Rename. Maps item.urls.url.content into the more standard item.link, which is recognized by RSS readers and the Yahoo Pipes output for clickable links back to the original content. Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe. I’ve created many Yahoo Pipes, and most of them have been published on my Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks page where you can also learn more about my Yahoo Pipes Training courses. Related Fast Wonder Blog posts Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks Introduction to Yahoo Pipes: A 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo Find Flickr Comments by Tag Using YQL in Yahoo Pipes Yahoo Pipes for Social Media Monitoring and Business Benefit Power (and Pain) of Yahoo Pipes for RSS Aggregation