How can you create a communal Yahoo Pipes feed?

July 9, 2009 5:37 PM

Can I use Yahoo Pipes to create a feed that contains a bunch of other feeds added by other people?

All of the example pipes I've seen are made of feeds inputed by one person. Is there a way to make one designed such that other people can add feeds to the pipe?

Just to let you know, I'm trying to make a feed that that works like the Recent Twitters by MeFites page.

posted by The Devil Tesla to computers & internet (9 comments total)

I've never tried this, and the old PC I'm on precludes running any web app as rich as Pipes right now, but the first thing I would look at is this: a database of feeds, editable via a web interface, that Pipes could draw in as its list of feeds. That way others could (publicly? privately?) contribute to a library of RSS sources and the pipe would collate them as intended.

It's not a purely Pipes solution, but it's just crazy enough that I'd spend a few days trying to pull it off.
posted by tapesonthefloor at 7:25 PM on July 9

What tapesonthefloor said. I'd use Google Docs to create the feed list.
posted by Pronoiac at 7:53 PM on July 9

The only inputs allowed by Pipes are text fields, where you want areas to somehow delimit things. You could potentially do an FOAF thing.
posted by pwnguin at 8:16 PM on July 9

This pipe does what I suggested. It looks easily repurposed; let me know if you could use a hand.
posted by Pronoiac at 11:01 PM on July 9

That pipe helped, Pronoiac, but it wasn't exactly what I needed since it included a bunch of extra things that I didn't need. The end solution I used is stupidly simple (yay Pipes!). This is basically what I did. Look at that if you want to examine the results!

Google Docs isn't a perfect source, since it's a little unweldy to have everyone edit a document to add their feed. In a perfect world I'd make something like what tapesonthefloor described, but this is good enough. Thanks all!

P.S. I'm curious to what pwnguin is talking about, as I Googled FOAF and I'm still confused. If you could elaborate that would be cool, if not that's fine :).
posted by The Devil Tesla at 12:58 AM on July 10

Eh, there's not a huge difference between the two Pipes.

I think pwnguin was first mistakenly talking about Pipes that you can give parameters, like this otherwise irrelevant pipe, and second talking about having to friends-of-friends pointers that would let each person post their own list of feeds to add to the group list, & having those compiled automatically.

If having everyone edit the same file is unwieldy, then each person can have their own. You could also do this with a list of their Google Spreadsheets.

Could the delicious.com interface be better for them to add feeds to the list?
posted by Pronoiac at 12:28 PM on July 10

Actually, Google Spreadsheets has form functionality that took me a while to figure out was there. It's perfect.

Oh, and the board game podcast pipe you showed me is doing a lot in its loop that I'm not doing, but that is all. But yea, they are similar.
posted by The Devil Tesla at 4:11 PM on July 10

Mainly, I was thinking of just using FOAF to get an aggregate feed type from a single URL. But FOAF is far more complicated if you want it to be, it appears. I haven't actually messed with it, because people describe it using the word "ontology", so apologies for recommending something like that. Importantly, I skipped the title of this question and missed that you wanted something with communal write access.

What we do with Ubuntu Planet is a little more advanced: the planet configuration is stored in bzr (revision control) and reloaded every few hours (cron or post-commit, I can't recall). That's a feature that's kinda missing from Pipes. You can create, share and branch, but you can't merge changes or revert to a previous version. The latter is feasible, but I don't quite yet know how to represent the latter.

In theory I think it would be possible to write a web front-end to handle configuring Planet, but a) the demand is small, and b) there are ulterior motives for introducing revision control systems in the community.
posted by pwnguin at 8:59 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]

And of course, I mean to say that the "latter is feasible, but I don't quite yet know how to represent the former."
posted by pwnguin at 10:19 PM on July 11