Yahoo Pipes For Orchid Growers

Yahoo pipes is a resource that can be used to customize your RSS subscriptions.  I've only just recently tried it but so far I've used it to combine several feeds into one feed and used it to filtered feeds to exclude irrelevant content.

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 Pipes

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.