Search with Design

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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