Pipes!

Sometimes, even RSS is not enough. Being an avid Google Reader user for some time, I frequently thought of having a way to sift through the blog posts/ news items coming in my reading list.

And this is a problem in general, not just limited to RSS: information explosion is eating us out. It takes more time to visit, login, sift through information on a website than to really read/ understand what matters to us. RSS though easy to use, doesn't provide you a means to filter your feed.

So, last night, Yahoo! Pipes flashed in my mind. I had seen the tool, and played with it a while ago but I couldn't think of any application for personal use until recently.

An easy to comprehend example for freelance programmers is given below: You can get a feed from rentacoder.com for new projects available for bidding. You need to login to Yahoo! Pipes and use "Fetch Field" and "Filter" tools to create Pipe output as shown below:



This will give you a list of newly added projects on Rent A Coder with the keyword "PHP" in their description. The nice thing is that you can add the output of this pipe (as another RSS feed) in your Google Reader list. Here is a live running example of the same.

Happy plumbing!