Search with Design

If you can name this quote, you’ve worked in a cube farm too long. Or had an annoying boss with poor fashion taste. Or you’ve heard a co-worker answer their phone the same way for 6 years in a row and you want to strangle them with their phone cord and then hanging them in the lobby at a corporate chandelier.

Office Space, stands as the best tech company movie of all time. There is no debate. (I don’t want any comments on why you think Boiler Room is better, that’s a tech stock movie)

But perhaps my favorite scene, (who am I kidding, I soak up the lines like a Mexican sun tan after six margaritas) happens to be completed by two essential props - Cheetos and Tetris.

In my office, there hangs an ever changing screen printout of the latest high score. I have held the title, but Ryan stands supreme currently with a high score of 80,569 and a whooping 128 lines. It won’t stand forever, but it remains the current challenge.

The game is a simple, and a classic. There’s great strategy and excellent combinations. There’s bad luck and faith that “the game will provide” and then there’s just raw, unadulterated talent. The only office rule we have, your tall tetris tale of towering pixel precision must be accompanied by a screencap. (yes, we are designers and could photoshop a fallacy, but we take tetris as seriously as the AP takes their photos.) As a fair example, Ryan posed a claim that he scored over 100,000 but in the process of his last gasp to eek out an extra couple of puntos positivos, he hit the back button and lost his heroic effort. And he willingly does not press us to accept his score.

Now that some tetris integrity.

Yahoo! Pipes is a great GUI interface for something that has previously been done only by developers. The ability to filter, sequence, add, combine and translate RSS feed content any way you like is a great tool to have; especially for bloggers, avid RSS readers and website owners.

Although it’s getting more user-friendly all the time it can still be quite an inapproachable application for the beginner. Inspired by GrayWolf’s blog post on Yahoo! Pipes, I’ve written this guide, designed to help you get a basic grasp of Pipes so that you can start experimenting yourself. It’s set up in two parts, a ‘Quick Start Guide’ and the ‘Quick Reference’

Quick Start Guide

What is Pipes?

Yahoo! Pipes is composed of 4 items: Modules, Pipes, Pipe Output, and Input/Outputs spots. Modules take RSS information through their inputs, operate on the data, and export the data to their outputs, where they are delivered, by a pipe, to the pipe output.

The easiest way to think of Pipes is to imagine each Pipe as a sentence: modules are the verbs, RSS feeds the nouns, the output box is a period, and the pipes are the “and, but, so, then”; the conjunction words.

For instance, the sentence “Fetch the RSS feeds for Google Base and Craigslist, using a user-inputted location, and limit the results to apartments.” could be made into a pipe using 2 fetch modules, a user-input module, and a filter module.

Here is a quick example of how you can use Yahoo! pipes. Spring is just around the corner, and it’s time to find a new bike. This pipe will take all the bike listings in a Craigslist feed, analyze them for a certain style or brand of bike, and output the results to a new RSS feed.

“Search Craigslist for My Favorite Bike Brand.”

This pipe makes use of 3 modules: Fetch, User Input, and Filter. Fetch gets the craiglist URL for the SFBay Bikes section, the User Input asks for the keyword (bike brand, type, etc.), and Filter allows only those items with the keyword in the title to be passed to the final feed.

You can try out the pipe for yourself here: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/Wl07ZY_H2xGsZ4mql7okhQ/

How to build the pipe from the example:

1. Start a new pipe.

2. You will need to get 3 modules for this Pipe:

a. Open ‘Sources’ and drag the ‘Fetch’ module out to work area.

b. Open ‘User Inputs’ and drag ‘Text Input’ to the work area.

c. Open ‘Operators’ and get the ‘Filter’ module.

3. Go to Craigslist.org, find URL for the ‘Bikes’ section in your area.

4. Copy this URL into the Field in the Fetch module.

5. In the User-Input module, add some appropriate text for the Prompt and Name boxes, you should also add a keyword about bikes to the ‘default’ and ‘debug’ sections.

6. Change the fields in the Filter module to read ‘Permit’ ‘any’, and then change the first pull down box to ‘dc:title’ and leave the second one set to ‘Contains’

7. Now connect the pipes as I’ve done in the above picture:

a. Fetch > Filter

b. User-Input > keyword field in ‘Filter’

c. Filter > Pipe Output

And now you have a personalized RSS feed to find the bike you’re looking for on Craigslist (Please note: does not apply to the droids you’re looking for).

Click ‘More’ to see the Quick Reference…

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So I’m completely addicted to Yahoo! Pipes, the new service which allows you to create mashups of RSS feeds, as well as maps, user inputs, etc. There are even a few logical functions available to help you organize the data.

My first few forays into the pipes-world were somewhat disappointing due mostly to the fact that I was trying to do things with the interface that are a little bit out of it’s league.

My first project was an attempt to take Shoemoney’s website market RSS feed, parse out the URLs of sites for sale, and reconstruct them with Pagerank and Pages Indexed values to provide more stats on sites for sale. This failed because I couldn’t find a way to return PageRank values into my pipes.

So, for my first couple rounds, I have a couple of requests for future Pipes iterations: more logical operators and more ways to get information.

So, for my most recent project, I decided to tackle a more simple project, but one that requires lots of leg (finger) -work when you do it by hand: finding link partners for SEO.

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