Last week, I was having lunch with some community members and a discussion about blogging and RSS readers got started. During the discussion someone mentioned that a family member had a blog, but only posted content they were interested in every once in a while. The complaint was that when adding the blog to their RSS reader they had to review the content each time to see if it was relevant. Not long ago, I was introduced to a tool called Yahoo Pipes. Pipes is an free on-line tool that allows you the ability to aggregate, manipulate and mashup content from around the web.
Example, here you will see I am in Yahoo Pipes and fetching two feeds, Scott Guthrie's blog and Scott Hanselman's Hanselminutes feed. Notice the bottom of the screen shows a snapshot of the results that I can expect from the two feeds.
Now I can add the Filter operator to the design surface and restrict the feeds to only those entries with Silverlight in the title. The blue line indicates that the feed source is sending (piping) the data from the feeds to the filter operator. This is done via a click and drag of the mouse so is very intuitive. At the bottom of the screen you will see that our snapshot of results are now limited to Silverlight entries only.
I connect the Filter operator to the Pipe Output and I can now save my pipe. Once saved, the Run Pipe option will be displayed at the top of the screen as shown below.
After the pipe has run, you will have several options available to you, but most importantly you can create an entirely new RSS feed from the pipe which contains both the original feeds filtered to Silverlight entries only.
So whether you are looking to organize your RSS feeds by topic or trying to minimize reading a family members blog, Yahoo Pipes is a great tool. Remember, I have only shown one small piece of functionality, but you can create much more complex pipes with just a little effort.
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