Yahoo Pipes For Orchid Growers

Yahoo pipes is a resource that can be used to customize your RSS subscriptions.  It's pretty powerful and can be used to combine feeds, filter feeds and create feeds from pretty much any page.

Combining Feeds

Let's say, for whatever reason, I wanted to combine all my Flickr feeds into one feed.  Here's how it could be done..

1. Visit yahoo pipes and click "Create a pipe" (top of page)

2. Click and drag "Fetch Feed" (left side of page) onto the grid area...

3. Copy and paste your feed URL into the text box

4. Click +URL to add additional feeds

5. Click and drag the circle to the pipe output circle

6. Click refresh (bottom) to see your items

7. Click "Save" (upper right) and name your pipe

8. Click "Run pipe" (top middle)

9. Copy your pipe address and add it to Google Reader

 

Filtering Feeds

Let's say that I want my newly created pipe to exclude all feed items that contain the word Paphiopedilum...

1. Click "Edit source"

2. Click "Operators" (left) and drag Filter onto the grid

3. Drag the feed circle to the filter circle and drag the filter circle to the output circle

4. Click the text box to select fields to filter

5. Paste Paphiopedilum into the third text box and press "+Rule" to filter another field

6. Save the pipe and view the output.

 

Creating Feeds

Not all orchid related websites provide RSS feeds.  Fortunately, Yahoo Pipes provides a useful module for creating an RSS feed for pretty much any page with regularly updated content.  Following this tutorial I created some custom feeds for orchid forums that I regularly visit.  Unfortunately, the "Fetch Page" module requires basic knowledge of HTML and working knowledge of Regular Expressions (RegEx) so it's not accessible to everybody.  Feel free to contact me if there are any custom feeds you'd like me to create in exchange for epiphytic/lithophytic orchid species.

 

Sharing Feeds

Once you've created a feed via Yahoo Pipes you can click "Get Badge" and copy the code to display the feed on most webpages.  For example...when I copy and paste this code...

<script src="http://l.yimg.com/a/i/us/pps/listbadge_1.3.js">{"pipe_id":"0954f44cab9c6f493b497f4944be4bd8","_btype":"list"}</script>

...into the source code of this page then here's the result...