Yahoo Pipes is pretty neat
February 15, 2008 – 11:03 pmI know Pipes has been around for a while, but I just now got into using it. The interface is really simple to use but configuring the actual modules is something that requires at least a little programming talent. This is particularly true once you start involving aspects like regular expressions. Pipes doesn’t do everything, but it gives you enough logic bits to create some pretty impressive mashups.
You can see my first pipe here which basically just combines the RSS feeds for people in my office. The whole thing is pretty simple… It grabs the feeds, spits them through a couple of regexes to add the source to the title of each item, and does a descending sort on the pubDate. That’s pretty awesome.
Pipes also allows you to grab the results of your creation in either RSS or JSON, which means you can use that data programatically without having to make a bunch of requests to a bunch of different sites. This also means, if you want to add data sources to your applications all you have to do is add the info to your pipe, save it, and your application will update.
Pipes doesn’t replace webapps but it does make them easier to build. Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I’ve got to stay up all night tinkering with my pipes.
