Yahoo Pipes can make it easier to work with location data (latitude / longitude) across multiple RSS feeds, even when the original feeds have different ways of specifying the location data. In this demo, I’ll show you how to use the Location Extracter module to normalize the data and then filter on lat / long data to get results only within a certain area.
More Details
- The Demo Pipe. A copy of the Using Location Data: 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Demo pipe click “View Source” to see the modules.
- Fetch Feed. In this example, we will use a feed from Shizzow containing information about places and a feed from the USGS with earthquake data. Both store their lat / long data in different ways within the RSS Feed.
- Location extractor. This module is atypical, since it takes no parameters and has no user configurable elements. It simply looks for lat / long data and saves what it finds as y:location.lat and y:location.lon.
- Sort. Sort by date (descending) to make sure that the output from your various source feeds appears in sorted order.
- Filter. We then filter the source feeds to include only the entries located in the western part of the United States (25 < latitude < 50 and -130 < longitude < -115).
- 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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