Some time ago I was writing about my idea of powerful rss filters to control my flood of incoming posts. I wrote a small prototype with very limited functionality. It was good enough for me but I always dreamed about releasing it to the public. But configuration via text configfile is nothing for the general public. OK, back to the subject.

editing a filter to combine all my feeds

Last week Julian told me about pipes.yahoo.com. It is everything I wanted plus a lot of other features. Processing starts with “sources” with output that can be piped into “operators”.

Sources

Right now, there are 5 types of sources available: Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Local, Fetch, Google Base, Flickr. For my purpose “Fetch” was already sufficient. Given an URL it returns the feed content for further processing.

Operators

• Union: combines two feeds
• Sort: sorts items by a number of different criteria
• Filter: blocks items matching certain rules

Example

Within a few minutes of playing around I build an RSS feed for all my blogs combined into a single feed.

Feature requests

I don’t know I anybody from the pipes team reads this post (if they do: great tool! please keep improving it!). Pipes is already very powerful, but a few things could be even better:

• Union operators with any number of inputs. As you can see from my screen-shot, just combining 6 feeds is already messy
• Debug the debug view. When I was playing around, the debug view was frequently missing items.
• Shrink the boxes. My screen is 1600×1200 and was barely big enough to show my configuration
• Friendly URLs: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/8F_X3gO52xGCN6i7HxeTaQ/run?_render=rss is ugly