Tag Archives: demo

Yahoo Pipes Videos

Using Yahoo Pipes to Filter Results for Iterasi PositivePress

I’ve been beta testing Iterasi’s PositivePress for a while and was excited to finally see it released to the public! It’s a great way to track and archive blog posts and articles from across the web while creating reports with links to certain articles that can be delivered to clients or friends. CNET did a great job of covering the release, so I won’t rehash it here. I encourage you to read the CNET article for more information about PositivePress.

Since PositivePress uses RSS feeds as input, I decided to do a quick video showing you how to use Yahoo Pipes to filter results from your RSS feed to make sure that you are only archiving and reporting on the most relevant results. This video shows you how to take a list of feeds from a CSV file, fetch the results, and filter them for a set of keywords. The end result is fed into PositivePress and a new report is generated from the filtered results.

If you haven’t already watched the rest of the Yahoo Pipes Video series, you might benefit from watching these other videos first. They provide a little more background on the concepts used in this Yahoo 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 (30 MB) to watch. The quality will be much better than the flash version above.

More Details on the Pipe:

  • The Demo Pipe. A copy of the Using Yahoo Pipes with Iterasi PositivePress pipe click “View Source” to see the modules.
  • Fetch CSV Module. Enter the URL of a CSV file. Here is the example we used in the video.
  • Loop module with Fetch Feed. Loops through each element in the CSV file and fetches the feed associated with the item.
  • Filter Module (Permit). Filter by a couple of keywords to permit only the results that match at least one of your keywords
  • Filter Module (Block). Filter out any results that match undesired keywords.
  • 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.

Yahoo Pipes Videos

Keyword CSV Files and Searching: 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Demo

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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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Yahoo Pipes Videos

Filter By Date: A 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Demo

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This 2 minute Yahoo Pipes demos shows how to filter by date using the filter module combined with the date builder module to find all of the posts in the past 2 days from our feeds. If you haven’t already watched the 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Introductory Demo, I strongly suggest that you watch it. This demo builds on the basic structure developed in the introductory demo with the same feeds from ReadWriteWeb and GigaOM that we used in the original demo.

More Details

  • The Demo Pipe. A copy of the Filter By Date Pipe click “View Source” to see the modules.
  • Fetch Feed. Fetches the elements from 2 feeds: ReadWriteWeb and GigaOM.
  • Date Builder Module. Defines the date parameters for filters. In this case, I’ve filtered on ‘2 days ago’
  • Filter Module. Filter by blocking any item where date (item.y:published.utime) is greater than 2 days ago.
  • 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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Yahoo Pipes Videos

Pipes within Pipes: A 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo

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We’ve talked about many different uses for Yahoo Pipes in previous 2 minute Yahoo Pipes demos, but you can also use most existing Yahoo Pipes within other pipes. In this demo, we’ll use a couple of pipes I’ve previously created as the input into a new Yahoo Pipe, and we’ll introduce the union operator as a way to pull several inputs together.

More Details

  • The Demo Pipe. A copy of the Pipes within Pipes demo pipe click “View Source” to see the modules.
  • Union Module. Pull several inputs together into a single output.
  • Unique Module. Use this to prevent duplicate results when multiple search queries might return the same results by filtering on item.link.
  • 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.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts

Yahoo Pipes Videos

CSV File Inputs: 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo

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This video shows how to get input from a list of items in a CSV file, and it introduces the loop module. A CSV file is a great choice when you want to fetch a bunch of feeds and change them frequently without having to update your pipe. If you haven’t already watched the 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Introductory Demo, I strongly suggest that you watch it. This demo builds on the basic structure developed in the introductory demo. The CSV file I’m using also contains the same feeds from ReadWriteWeb and GigaOM that we used in the original demo plus a few others.

More Details

  • The Demo Pipe. A copy of the CSV File Input in Yahoo Pipes Demo 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 Fetch Feed. Loops through each element in the CSV file and fetches the feed associated with the item.
  • Filter Module. Filter by a couple of keywords.
  • 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.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts

Yahoo Pipes Videos

Yahoo Pipes Training: A 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Demo

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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.

More Details

You can view a copy of the 2 Minute Demo Pipe Source.

Modules Used:

  • Fetch Feed. Enter your source feeds here. These are the feeds that have the information you want to filter.
  • Filter. Filter the source feeds to include only posts that match certain keywords.
  • Sort. Sort by date (descending) to make sure that the output from your various source feeds appears in sorted order.
  • Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe.

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