Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!
Friday, February 8th, 2008
I tend to subscribe to quite a few sites on a regular basis and have quite a few RSS feeds in my reader of choice. I have quite a broad range of topics I like to follow, but sometimes I come across a site where there is really only one bit I want to follow, but the site has only one feed url split into categories. This presents me with a problem as I only really want to visit the feed when there is a story from the category I want to follow. My feed reader will tell me when there are new items in the feed but not when there are new items just from my category in the feed. In this situation I have not subscribed to the feed and just visit the site periodically if I remember.
Yesterday I stumbled upon one such site. A colleague sent me a link to a site which has a segment called “Zero Punctuation”. After watching this segement and laughing so much I almost cried I was hooked. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen this before, it was a regular segment, lets subscribe to this feed. But no, not that easy, the site only had a general feed. Another site to try and remember to visit.
After my exclamation of dismay Ben, who I sit next to, suggested why not use Yahoo Pipes to customise the feed to my liking. What a brilliant suggestion, I had wanted to try out pipes for a while but hadn’t had a good reason. Today I set about the task of creating this feed and it turned out to be incredibly simple. After logging into the site here are the steps I went through to create my feed.
1. Add a Fetch Feed Module and enter the feed url.
2. Add a filter module to site
3. Link up the modules
4. Save the pipe
It was that simple. By choosing to get this pipe as RSS I had an alternative feed URL which I could use in my reader which gave me exactly what I wanted. It was so easy I created another one for another site which I wanted to subscribe to but up until now was unable to. Here are the URLs to my new feeds, the content of which are not very work friendly, so you have been warned! They will also probably be empty because they are so periodical that there is often no content in the feed which matches my criteria, rest assured though if there was your feed reader would tell you…