Over the past several months I've started writing blog posts for sites other than my own. This is pretty cool, and I want a way to capture all of my posts in an RSS feed that I can display on my main site. This required some mashing of RSS feeds. Enter
Yahoo! Pipes.
I've used pipes before but it had been a while. I fire the interface back up and it looks slicker with a more intuitive interface.
I started by adding several feeds this little widget. Plug in the feed URL and you now have a link.
Next I created a filter limiting the posts in the feed to a specific word. No even if I post on someones blog, I can filter out all but my posts. The cool thing here is the filter reads all the possible properties of the RSS feed and makes them available in a drop down. So you could filter on the Author, the date, category or any number of other properties.
And finally I wanted the latest posts at the top so I created a sort pattern using this little widget.
Once I have all of this ready to go I get a sample of what the output will look like so I can see if my filter is working correctly. If not I can go back and make changes. There is a refresh button that lets you see a new output each time yo make changes.
The end result is a nifty looking widget layout of the whole process.
A couple of cool features are the ability to share your public pipes, clone someones public pipes and then modify for your use. At the moment its all free, which is cool. Draw back, there is no SEO for using the type of feed. So I wouldn't recommend it for your blogs main RSS feed.
If you are looking for a way to mashup several RSS feeds, Yahoo! Pipes is a great tool.
What services do you use to mash your RSS?
If you watch the TV show Chuck, undoubtedly you heard the Zune burn on last nights episode. To set the scene, Chuck is trying to figure out how to reach the Kill Screen on the video game Missile Command. Chuck realizes the sequence to win the game matches the Rush song Tom Sawyer. Chuck looks at Morgan, his trusty sidekick..
