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 video shows how to request a user input and use the keyword from the user as the filter in a Yahoo Pipe. If you haven’t already watched the 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Introductory Demo, I strongly suggest that you watch it. The user input demo starts with the simple pipe created in the introductory demo and changes the filters from keywords hardcoded in the introductory pipe to the keyword from the user input.
Podcast Feed and iTunes
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The Demo Pipe. A copy of the User Input Demo Pipe click “View Source” to see the modules.
Fetch Feed Module. Contains 2 feeds: ReadWriteWeb and GigaOM.
Text Input Module. Leave Name and Position as the defaults. Prompt: “enter a keyword” or other instructions for the user. Default and Debug: “apple” in this example. You can generally use the same term for default and debug, but make sure that you use a word commonly found in your feeds that will generate enough volume for testing and will generate default results for your users to view.
Filter Module. Filter by the keyword entered in the user input module by connecting the text input to the filter module as seen in the demo.
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.
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.
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.
If you have been wanting to create Yahoo Pipes, but weren’t quite sure where to start when faced with the blank page on a new Yahoo Pipe, I created a very simple demo to get you started. This Yahoo Pipes demo will help you get started with Yahoo Pipes and show you what you need to know to create a basic Pipe. We use filtering for this example, since Yahoo Pipes is great at taking feeds and filtering to display only the posts that match (or exclude) certain keywords. The demo covers taking multiple feeds as inputs, filtering on keywords, sorting, and using the debugger to analyze the elements of your source feeds and your output. After watching this demo, you should be able to create a basic Yahoo Pipe and use it to filter to include or exclude items that match certain keywords.
Yahoo Pipes Training
I also wanted to take this opportunity to announce that I will begin conducting Yahoo Pipes training for organizations. These 2 hour classes will cover the basics of building Yahoo Pipes and provide some custom content if needed to help meet the specific needs of your organization.