Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with yahoopipes

How can you create a communal Yahoo Pipes feed?

The Devil Tesla — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:37:50 -0800

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.

Help with regex exp. for Yahoo Pipes

jingo74 — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:40:51 -0800

I'm a librarian who uses Yahoo Pipes in combination with RSS feeds for new books from Amazon to order books. The title tags in each individual item begin as in this example: "#1: A. Lincoln: A Biography". I would like to add a regex expression that will strip out the ranking (#1: or #10:) out of the title so that I can sort the book titles. What I want to remove is the # sign, the ranking number (one or two digit number), and the colon. Any help would be appreciated.

How can I get automate my daily news searches?

abkadefgee — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:28:39 -0800

How can I automate the news searches that I'm performing on the same subjects day after day after day? I'm working for an employer who needs current information on what the press is saying each day. It would be great if it were an issue of what the big national papers were saying and I could simply use Google News, but I need information from our state and local papers, including those that have only a weekly distribution cycle.

Right now, I'm forced to spend time searching through ten websites a day, often to find no new information. It seems like there should be a way to automate this process so that new information pops up in my email box or RSS reader and I can see what's new right away.

So far, I've been considering applications like Dapper, Yahoo Pipes, Google Alerts, or Feed43. I can't simply subscribe to RSS feeds from the sites directly, since most of them are written in 1998-style code and don't have RSS feeds or tagging of articles.

Google Alerts seems to be out of the running since it often pops up with articles that are months old and misses the local papers.

Dapper seems like it could be great, except that I'm having some trouble tweaking it so that it doesn't send me an update just because a banner ad changes. I think I could get it to work, but I could use a tutorial.

Yahoo Pipes seems like it could be very powerful, but it's a bit intimidating.

Feed43 I've heard good things about, but it doesn't seem to do much more than turn pages into RSS feeds and this doesn't help me with the search.

If you have any tips for using the above services or could point me in the direction of a better solution, I'd really appreciate it. I'd bet someone else out there has had to work through a similar situation at some point. Thanks in advance!

How to avoid duplicate stories over individual RSS feeds

Mave_80 — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 07:14:34 -0800

I have multiple RSS feeds from different websites in Google Reader. However I find that there is a lot of duplication when I go through the individual feeds. Is there a way therefore to combine / group similar stories together (similar perhaps to Google News)? For example, let's say I'm interested in Apple and I like to read technological news sites like Cnet, Technocrati, Engadget etc. Is there a way that I could combine the RSS feeds of all these, and have it collate stories on Apple together somehow? I'm wondering if what I'm looking for is Yahoo Pipes - unfortunately I've haven't had much luck in deciphering how to use it... other there other more user friendly alternatives or am I destined to continue reading the same story many times over?

How to merge rss feeds?

empath — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 12:50:32 -0800

Trying to merge multiple blogs into one feed. Yahoo pipes strips out the author field-- any ideas? Are there any other ways to merge multiple feeds into one feed or is there a way to get yahoo pipes to pass the author field to the final feed?

Or failing that, is there a way to convert json to RSS? The pipes json output has all the fields.

Yahoo Pipes multiple author filter?

Chrysostom — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 12:24:34 -0800

When Yahoo Pipes first came out, there was some muttering about how this would be handy for creating a feed for an individual author on a multi-author blog w/o feeds by author? But I can't seem to find anyone who's done it, or successfully do so myself. Any Pipes gurus on AskMe? The three author filters I'd specifically like to create are:

TNR's The Plank: all authors EXCEPT James Kirchick
AOL Sportsblog: ONLY posts authored by mjd
Reason's Hit & Run: all authors EXCEPT David Weigel

One problem seems to be that there isn't an author tag on these-posts on The Plank, for example, just have the author's name as the last line of the post. But maybe I'm missing something.