Fast Wonder: Online Community Consulting

Yahoo Pipes can also be used with other services, like PostRank, for example. PostRank, originally called AideRSS, is a service that rates the posts on any blog by popularity using comments, links, bookmarks, tweets, and other measurements to give each post a rank from 1 – 10. Luckily for us, PostRank conveniently stores the rank right in the RSS feed allowing us to access it from Yahoo Pipes. In our last Yahoo Pipes demo, I showed you how to Modify RSS Feeds to work better for your purposes. I recommend watching the 2 minute demo about modifying RSS feeds if you haven’t already, since we will use those concepts again in this pipe.

This Yahoo Pipes video series is also available as a podcast on iTunes, and as a separate feed.

You can watch the embedded video above, but I recommend downloading the higher resolution Quicktime file (25 MB) or clicking the full screen toggle icon in the player to watch. The quality will be much better than the flash version embedded above.

More Details

• The Demo Pipe. A copy of the Using PostRank demo pipe – click “View Source” to see the modules.
• PostRank. Using the 2 feeds that we’ve been using for most of these demos, ReadWriteWeb and GigaOM, we analyze each of them using PostRank, filter by the best posts, and copy the RSS feed for the output.
• Fetch Feed. Fetches the elements from 2 PostRank feeds for ReadWriteWeb and GigaOM from the previous step.
• Sort Module. Sort by PostRank in descending order to keep the posts with the highest rank at the top.
• Loop module with String Builder Module. Loops through each element in the feed and builds a string with item.postrank:postrank: item.title. This string is assigned back into item.title.
• Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe.

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.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts

• Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks
• Introduction to Yahoo Pipes: A 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo
• Quick Vanity Feed: 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo
• Yahoo Pipes for Social Media Monitoring and Business Benefit
• Power (and Pain) of Yahoo Pipes for RSS Aggregation