If you haven’t already watched my 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Introductory Demo, you might want to back up and start by watching it. This quick vanity feed demo builds on the concepts learned in the introduction with a practical example of how to create a quick and dirty vanity feed using Yahoo Pipes. Let me start by saying that this is a quick and easy way to create a vanity feed, but it isn’t the most elegant solution, since it has limited configuration options. However, that would be a much longer demo, and I wanted to have something that you can get started with quickly.
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, a vanity feed is where you search for mentions of your name, your company’s name, your products, your website and other mentions related to what people are saying about you online. In this example, we are using Gartner Research and assuming that the person building this pipe works at Gartner and wants to better understand what people are saying about the company online.
More Details
- The Demo Pipe. A copy of the Quick Vanity Feed Demo pipe.
- Example. We are using Gartner Research as our example company throughout this demo.
- Fetch Feed Module. Contains 3 preconfigured searches using various sites. You can enter your search on any search engine that allows RSS feed output. Grab the RSS feed from your search and place it in the Fetch Feed module.
- Unique Module. Use this to prevent duplicate results when multiple search engines return the same articles by filtering on item.link.
- Filter Module. Filter out any unwanted results based on item links, keywords, or any other criteria. After watching your feed for a few days, you will start to see things you want to filter out even if you can’t think of any now.
- 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 courses.
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Cool video. You make this look so incredibly easy!
Btw, your link to the Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks is broken (it includes a date portion, which is unnecessary).
Brent, thanks! I’ve fixed the link, too.
Hi Dawn,
Great video on Pies… I just discovered this service recently and am flipping out about it. Been looking for something like this for the past two years. Excellent video – I’m gonna go watch the rest now 🙂