Getting started with Yahoo! Pipes

Some newspapers get the Internet. The Guardian for example provide full-text RSS feeds, and let you subscribe to individual Columnists or whole sections.

The Times meanwhile, (despite producing the simply brilliant Bugle Podcast with Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver), doesn’t really get the whole online connivance thing. For example they let you subscribe to the Columnists section of the website, but do not give you any way to select individual columnists. I happen to rather like the weekly musings of the marvellously disreputable, and highly opinionated Jeremy Clarkson, and the far more insightful former MP, Matthew Parris.

So you need to take the (Columnist RSS feed), and plug that into the handy Yahoo! Pipes. Yahoo! Pipes lets you take a web feed, and do all sorts of clever things with it like combining many feeds into one, or filter items or translate the whole feed. In this example, we are simply going to take the Times Columnist RSS feed and pick out the individual columnists we are interested in. If you already have a Yahoo! Account, log into it, if you do not create one. Don’t worry I will be here when you get back.

Okay, so now we need to make the Pipe, so head on over to Yahoo! Pipes and select ‘Make New Pipe’. You are looking at the edit screen, on the left are the box of toys we can use and on the right is the work screen. First click and drag the ‘Fetch Feed’ out of the toolbox and onto the work screen.

You’ll now have two boxes, the ‘Fetch Feed’ and the ‘Pipe Output’. Stick the Columnist RSS feed, (feed://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/feeds/rss/comment.xml) into the ‘Fetch Feed’ box. If you drag the bubble on the bottom of the ‘Fetch Feed’ box and connect it to the bubble on the top of the ‘Pipe Output’ box, and hit the ‘refresh’ clink in the grey output box at the bottom you will see a list of posts from the Columnist RSS feed. You can click on either of the bubbles again and click on the scissors to disconnect them and move on.

Right, in the toolbox click on ‘Operators’ then click and drag the ‘Filter’ out of the toolbox and to the work screen somewhere between the ‘Fetch Feed’ and the ‘Output’ boxes. In here you have options to filter your feeds data. We want to only permit feeds by Jeremy Clarkson in this example so in the ‘Filter’ box, set the mode to “Permit” items that match “all” of the following. Then in the first box you want select ‘item.link’ from the drop-down and then in the right-hand box type: jeremy_clarkson if we wanted Matthew Parris we would type: matthew_parris

Now simply connect the bubble on the bottom of the ‘Fetch Feed’ box to the bubble on the top of the ‘Filter’ box, then connect the bubble on the bottom of the ‘Filter’ box to the bubble on the top of the ‘Pipe Output’ box. Hit the ‘refresh’ clink in the grey output box at the bottom you will see a list of posts from Jeremy Clarkson. Now, there is the possibility it will be empty, because for some wacky reason the Times RSS feeds only show you the top five items so if Clarkson hasn’t written anything in a while, don’t worry it will show up when he has. Hit Save and now you have an RSS Feed to subscribe to that will only show you when Jeremy Clarkson has written something new for The Times.

Your Pipe should look something like this:

Hopefully you get the idea about what Yahoo! Pipes can do. You can see all of my pipes, (including a similar Pipe for Christopher Hitchens’ posts on Slate Magazine), on my Yahoo! Pipes page.