I Dream in Colors

11/10/07 Mixing my feeds with Yahoo Pipes

The home page of this website shows most of my online activity, but the RSS feed was lagging behind; it only showed the blog posts. Both Flickr and Del.icio.us provide RSS feeds, so how hard could it be to mix the three in one big feed? Turns out not at all, thanks to Yahoo Pipes

I had heard of the service but never tried it. I never really had a use for it. I have to say the interface is extremely cool. Being a visual guy I was very impressed with how you can manage your feeds easily as a diagram, pipes included!. What I did was the following:

1. Grabbed the Wordpress blog feed with the “Fetch feed” module.
2. Run that through the “Regex” module, to add “Blog post:” before the title. The syntax I used (I got it from somewhere else, I have no idea about regex!) is In title replace (.*) with Blog post: $1.
3. Repeated the process for both the Flickr feed and the Del.icio.us feed.
4. Merged all 3 feeds with the “Union” module.
5. Run that main feed through the “Sort” module, to sort all items by published date. The string I used was Sort by y:published in descending order.
6. Sent that to the Pipe Output, save the pipe and run it through Feedburner, replacing my old feed.

I wanted to do an extra step, adding the link URL to the description on the del.icio.us feed, but I couldn’t find a way to do that from within Pipes. I probably could with an extra step (maybe run it through Feedburner first?) but I don’t want it to get too complicated.

So if you notice some glitches on this feed it’s because I did all this. It should be pretty seamless though.

Edit: the only problem is that the feed title links to my Yahoo Pipes page instead of my website. I think you can change that on feedburner, but I can’t find it (anyone?). If I can’t fix this I think I’ll have to drop Pipes and use only Feedburner to merge my feeds. For now it’ll be pretty much the same, but I’m planning to add another feed in the future and it would be tricky withouth Pipes.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo Pipes, Feedburner, RSS feed, RSS, RSS merge

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