It’s been a while since I’ve posted a 2 minute Yahoo Pipes video, but I had an opportunity to do a guest post on the Yahoo Developer Network blog (yay!), and I thought that a 2 minute screencast would be the best way to demonstrate my pipe.
This 2 minute demo takes a series of keywords from a CSV file and uses Yahoo Pipes to run each keyword through various searches. This technique can be very powerful when you search multiple services, but I’ve simplified the process to make it easier to understand the fundamentals of the technique by running the list of keywords only through Twitter search.
Here’s a quote about the technical details of the pipe from the Yahoo Developer Network post:
Technical Details and More Information:
- The Demo Pipe. A copy of the Keyword CSV demo pipe – click “View Source” to see the modules.
- Fetch CSV Module. Enter the URL of the CSV file (make sure that it already exists in a publicly accessible location) along with information about column names and separation characters as needed.
- Loop module with URL Builder. Loops through each element in the CSV file and builds a search URL formatted for RSS output. In this case, we used Twitter search.
- Loop module with Fetch Feed. Loops through each URL built in the previous step and fetches the feed associated with the item.
- Sort Module. Sort by date in descending order to make sure things are sorted in a logical manner.
- 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 course on May 7th.
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Gee you’re soooo good at learning new technology like the yahoo pipes, thank you so much for these great tutorials. I’ve been waiting for this ever since I’ve heard yahoo is going to launch yahoo pipes yet your effort made me understand how to use yahoo pipes.
Don’t know if you aware of this problem regarding Yahoo Pipes + Google Reader… Unlike other RSS feeds, I found Yahoo Pipes feed didn’t get updated or maybe only once or twice per day by Google Reader (I think updates may not be by the Google Reader itself but something behind in a specific schedule because even if I kick “Refresh” manually in Reader, it won’t pick up new items for the Pipes feeds) I am sure my Yahoo Pipes feeds are working fine because I have setup FeedDaemon to directly monitoring the feeds every 15 mins and data are coming in regularly without any problem.