Mashing Feeds with Yahoo! Pipes

As I mentioned previously Yahoo! Pipes has a great deal of potential. The more you use the service the more you begin to see what can be done with it. Probably the most obvious use that jumps to mind (in fact its mentioned in the official description for the service) is mixing several feeds into one. While I wouldn't necessarily do this to many of my "must read" feeds, it certainly does make managing some of my less important ones easier.

The first mashup I created was designed to take a series of comic strips and mix them down into one feed. Besides simply showing the comics I wanted I also wanted to remove any of the "news" posts that tend to get mixed in. In this post I wanted to talk a bit about how I created the mashup and filter that accomplished this.

Collecting some Feeds

I started this pipe with three feeds in mind. I knew, because they've been in my feed reader for ages now, that they shared some similarities that would make filtering easier. Before we get into filtering the results, though, lets just look at the three feeds.

• GU Comics
• Penny Arcade
• Ctrl+Alt+Del

Yah - there are a lot of good Video Game related comics these are just three I'm starting with.

The Yahoo! Pipes Fetch Module

The Fetch Module is one of the basic sources of information you can pre-set in a pipe. Simply put in a URL and pipes will determine if its a valid feed. As you can see I've added the three feeds I'm looking for. On the left side you'll also see that two of the three have already been verified as feeds. The third is valid, it just hadn't been validated yet.

Most of the pieces module pieces are pretty straight forward. Keep an eye on the circular buttons at the left and bottom though as they'll come in handy later.

Once you've added your feeds to the list you're ready for the next step.

Setting up the Yahoo! Pipes Filter Module

If you've ever setup an e-mail filter this should look familiar to you. Before you can actually run the filter you'll need to connect the two modules. In this feed we're setting up a direct relationship with all the items in the "Fetch" module and the filter so we're going to connect the two using the main buttons located at the bottom of the "Fetch" module and the top of the "Filter" one. If you're dealing with feeds that need individual filters (say I only wanted to filter the GUComics feed) you can use the connector to the right of that item.

The three strips I'm using here label their entries either "Comic" or "News" in their feeds. As I mentioned earlier I'm interested in filtering out the "News" pieces so I went ahead and selected the "Title" and "Contains" options from the drop down lists. Remember that the first drop down list won't get populated until you've wired the modules together. This gives you the chance to choose individual aspects of each feed so you can filter them however you want.

The final step here involves wiring your filter into the "Pipe Output" module. Once that's done you're all set. Click the Save button and head over then "Pipe Preview" to see how its working. If everything is working properly just grab the RSS address and you're ready to add the custom feed to your feed reader.