Pipes to the rescue

I’ve always though that Yahoo Pipes was a pretty cool thing. I’ve done a lot of work inside Scouta working with incoming and outgoing RSS, and the idea of doing ‘arithemetic’ on feeds is intriguing.

So, a problem just came up: for Widgety Goodness, we wanted to feed in all posts about Widgety Goodness and Widgets and Brighton into the WG07 backnetwork, but backnetwork would only accept tagged posts from registered bloggers that have activated their accounts. That limits the amount of blog articles that can be seen in backnetwork, which is a shame. Here’s how I got around it:

1. I constructed some searches in Google Blog Search for appropriate keywords
2. For each of these blog searches, I got an RSS feed, and then fed them into a Yahoo Pipe Fetch Feed block
3. Made a Union of these feeds
4. Sorted by ascending publish date
5. Removed duplicates
6. For each item in the resulting aggregated feed, I added the tag to the item.desciption with a Loop/String Builder
7. Fed the resulting into backnetwork, via a new user created called WG Feed.

Because backnetwork will aggregate all tagged posts from participant’s feeds, these posts now appear in the backnetwork Posts page.

It works nicely. One little issue is that all these posts show up as authored by the WG Feed user, but clicking through to get the full article goes to the right place.

Look at the pipe on Yahoo Pipes.