Yahoo Pipes: Combine the Latest Posts from Multiple Authors
Douglas Karr at 9:51 pmWith the conference, Masters of Business Online, around the corner, the group has been going back and forth with ideas to find some ingenious means of marketing the event itself. After all, if you’re going to have an event advertising the best of Online Marketing… you better do a great job at marketing the event! 
The challenge is that it’s a small venue and we’re preparing for it quickly. How much do you need to market when you know you’re probably going to sell out? It’s a tough question. Lucky for us, we have a great team lead in Jim Brown from EverEffect. Jim is your consummate entrepreneur and marketer. When a few of us mentioned that we thought we should have a greater marketing presence - regardless of participation, Jim quickly called the team together and began execution. I can’t make our upcoming meeting, but I did have some fun tonight with one little project.
To raise some awareness of the folks involved in the conference, Jim toyed with the idea of aggregating all the blog feeds into a single feed. Parsing RSS isn’t too difficult, but doing it quickly can take some programming resources that we don’t have. Yahoo! Pipes to the rescue!!!
Tonight, I built a new pipe that looked up each of the feeds and then aggregated them together in a single feed in descending publication date order:
In order to build the Pipe, I pulled a fetch feed object for each person’s feed, then truncated each individual feed to one post. Since RSS is published with the latest feed last, this is the latest post by default. Once I completed that, I pulled a union tool over and unioned all of the feeds together. The union tool has only 5 incoming nodes, so I needed to follow it with another union node to bring in a 6th need. Lastly, I had to bring a sort object in and I sorted the posts in descending order by publication date.
Not only does this do all the difficult work and aggregate the feeds into a web page, there’s also a RSS output for the feed so you can utilize it with other tools for syndicating the content. Pretty cool stuff! If anything, Yahoo! Pipes is an awesome way to put your theories to the test before applying development resources! Yahoo! Pipes is an incredible tool and it doesn’t get enough attention!
Go here to see the published Masters of Business Online Pipe yourself.
If you have more time, SimplePie is awesome for twisting feeds in PHP.
In the end I couldn’t make the “Use this pipe” option appear. The del.icio.us feed is not always available, so the pipe gives some weird errors :-/ Maybe I’ll have to enter each address manually.