Yahoo Pipes RSS Mash-ups
I’ve been using Yahoo! Pipes quite a bit recently, partly because it’s so easy to use, and partly because it outputs data in RSS and JSON format.
For instance, if you decide to use the RSS output, you can use SimplePie to parse the data and display it, or you can output the JSON feed using jQuery. I’ve found the later method to be very quick and efficient, and it avoids the need to setup cache folders and cronjobs to automatically parse your feeds at set intervals.
By using Yahoo! Pipes it’s very easy to build a mash-up of several RSS feeds, and then choose how many items you want to display. I’m going to show you how to use Yahoo! Pipes to pull in several RSS feeds, limit the number of items to display and then output these feeds in one, single ‘Pipe’ feed.
How to do it
1. First off, you will need to have a Yahoo! account (if you have Yahoo! Mail, that login will suffice). If you don’t have one you’ll need to sign-up (but you’ll be prompted to do this at the Pipes site anyway).
2. 
Once you have a Yahoo! login, you will need to head over to the Yahoo! Pipes site and click the large blue Create a Pipe link. You’ll then be presented with a page that has a grid background (reminiscent of maths paper). On the left of the page is a sidebar with various options (see image).
You’ll notice that the sidebar has various tabs that can be expanded and collapsed. You won’t need to worry about most of them for this tutorial, but if you want to know what each module does, when you click on a module there is a description in the bottom panel of the sidebar.
3. Now you need to drag some modules onto the graph paper. You can drag them with your mouse or click the ‘+’ symbol on the right of each module. You will need the Fetch Feed module from the Sources tab, Number Input module from the User Inputs tab, and the Truncate module from the Operators tab. You will notice that Pipe Output is automatically added to the page.
4. Now you need to add your RSS feeds to the Fetch Feed module. I chose Gizmodo, Techcrunch and Mashable. For the purpose of this demonstration you can simply copy the source URLs from the previous three links, or replace them with your own feed URLs. The image below shows the Fetch Feed module. As you can see there is a ‘+’ symbol on the top left of the module that allows you to add multiple sources. Within reason you can add as many feeds as you like here.
5. Now in the Number Input module you just need to add the number of feed items you want to display to the filed marked default. I set mine to 20 for now.
6. Finally it’s a simple case of connecting the pipes to each other. This is done by pulling a pipe from the small blue circles on each module. The one exception to this is the Truncate module which is fed by the Fetch Feed module and the Number Input module before connecting to the Feed Output module. To see how this is done please refer to the image below.
If you prefer you can use my demonstration Pipe and edit it for your own needs here.
In a future tutorial I will show you how to use the JSON output from your newly created Yahoo! Pipe.
