The debugger serves a couple of functions in Yahoo Pipes. The first one is pretty obvious – debugging. It allows you to see exactly what is happening in each component of your Yahoo Pipe to help with the debugging process when something isn’t working quite right.
The debugger also serves a less obvious purpose. You can use it to learn more about the elements of the rss feeds that you are using as input. For most blogs, the rss feeds are fairly standard, but other services store all kinds of useful information in their rss feeds in addition to standard elements like link, title, and date. The debugger can help you find this additional information in the feed.
This Yahoo Pipes video series is also available as a podcast on iTunes, and as a separate feed.
Using The Debugger: 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo
You can watch the embedded video above, but I recommend downloading the higher resolution Quicktime file (19 MB) to watch. The quality will be much better than the flash version above.
More Details
- The Demo Pipe. A copy of the Yahoo Pipes Debugger Demo Pipe. Click “View Source” to see the modules.
- Fetch Feed Module. Contains 1 feed from Shizzow, which contains a wealth of location information within the feed.
- Filter Module. Filters posts with a certain keyword out of the feed to demonstrate the debugger.
- Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe.
- The demo also spends time using the debugger to explore various elements of the feed.
I’ve created many Yahoo Pipes, and most of them have been published on my Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks page where you can also learn more about my Yahoo Pipes Training courses.
Previous videos in the series:
Community Manager, Blogger, Vegan, and Technology Enthusiast
I found the voice-over was much too fast to understand. Did it explain how the debugger module was brought into play? Was it dragged from the side bar? I did not see anything about getting started.