There are many RSS feeds that I’ve subscribed to, and some websites that I check often that don’t have feeds, for example to read comics. With all the stuff in the feeds, there’s also some things that I don’t want to see, such as newsposts in some comic feeds that I only read for the comic. It would be nice if I could have those inexistant feeds created and those useless posts filtered…
Page2Rss and Yahoo Pipes are two very useful services, almost like tailor made for the purprose of adressing the above problems!
Custom feeds made easy
Page2RSS is a service which monitors websites for you and creates an RSS feed of it with the updates. Yahoo Pipes could be called a “mashup tool” – you can use it to combine, filter, edit etc. various sources on the net: Websites, RSS feeds, web services and such.
Creating an RSS feed for some specific URL couldn’t be any easier with page2rss: Simply put the URL to the box on their page and they’ll generate a feed for you. Combine it with Yahoo Pipes and the result is greatness. In fact, combining any RSS feed with Yahoo Pipes is great.
Pipes
I personally like the Pipes UI: It’s good looking and quite intuitive, but it can be a bit confusing at first, and the tools can be difficult to use if you aren’t a programmer. It’s a two sided sword – it gives you a lot of power but you need knowledge to be able to properly utilize it. Luckily there’s a help page for each component you can use, so if you just put some time in, you can learn to use it.
A good demonstration of the power and usefulness of the Pipes service is the custom feed I made for Control-Alt-Del. It’s a great web comic, but why do I have to always visit their site to read the comic? I would much rather just see the image in my feed reader. Also, there are sometimes other non-comic posts in the feed which I don’t really care about.
With some smart usage of Pipes, you can strip out the non-comic posts and even link the comic image to the feed itself. First, use the Fetch Feed component to load the feed, then use the Filter component to block out all items that contain “News” in the title. Now we have a feed without the newsposts.
Then, after some looking at the feed and the comic image names, I figured out a way to extract the name of the image from the link to the comic. So then I used the Rename component to copy the link to the description (the content) of the item and finally the Regex component to perform a search and replace operation on the description, replacing the link URL with a HTML img element to the image itself.
Now I only see the content that is relevant to my interests. All without closing the feed reader, too. It may sound like nitpicking, but if you have lots of feeds, it does save you time when you don’t have to delete or mark read things that you don’t even find interesting to begin with.
You could use Pipes for much bigger jobs too. You could combine multiple feeds into one, for example from various news sites and perhaps filter that so that it only contains posts that are about kittens.
In any case, it’s definitely a very useful tool for mucking with feeds.