I had been reading about Yahoo Pipes in at least a cursory manner at the O’Reilly Radar blog (highly recommended for those interested in the newest web tech talk – http://radar.oreilly.com/ ). Well I decided to explore them today, especially since they involve using RSS feeds.

So I got myself a Yahoo profile and visited the beta Yahoo! Pipes™ (http://pipes.yahoo.com/) site. I then cloned one pipe someone created that pulled all 20 official Yahoo! blogs and sorted the entries by date. I turned it into a pipe that pulls about 1/2 dozen library-related blogs (from my own set of Firefox Live bookmarks aka syndication feeds) and sorts them by date – I added the extra filter of limiting them to the 10 most recent items from the blogs (so it doesn’t appear overwhelming). My Pipe can be viewed at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ds67iHm72xGKkszYe_gC8A. Take a look around at some of the neat pipes created, many interact with Flickr and other web services, making for some fascinating compilations of pieces of information from throughout the Web.

Update: I’ve been tweaking the pipe I created of various library blogs and have discovered that because they use different feed types (various flavors of RSS, Atom, etc) the variable for publication date is not universal. So now I’m creating a hierarchy and unioning all of the different feeds together.  I’m sure there’s a more elegant answer, but I want to pull just the two most recent posts from each blog. to be continued…