Cristiano on Tech/Life How to Build Your Own Lifestream with Yahoo Pipes and NO Server Side Logic
Step 1: Combine Your Blog Posts
I actually started this project to see if I could combine my RSS feeds from FourStarters.com and Blog.CristianoBetta.com into one actual RSS feed combining all MY posts. This included some filtering to remove posts not from me (sorry guys) and sorting this new RSS feed by date. I ended up looking at Yahoo Pipes and mashed up the data into one.
Yahoo Pipes proved to be pretty sufficient for this problem The clue in making a nice Pipe is pretty simple. Drop some modules from the left sidebar into the canvas on the right and connect the pipes by dragging lines between the anchors of the modules. The most useful modules for creating a lifestream are the Fetch Feed and the Union modules, but for a more extensive overview of how I made my Yahoo Pipe take a look at the feed source. If you don’t understand the workings of a module, take a look at the help files of the module by pressing the -?- icon.
For my first Yahoo Pipe I used the Fetch Feed, Sort, Unifion, and Filter modules like below (click to view):
Take a good look at the pipe above to see what I did (the actual pipe can be found here). There are a couple of tricks I am doing here, one of them was to I use the rename and regex modules to create a new entry in every post that says this is a blog post. This proved to be useful later on so keep on reading.
Additionally you see a little module called “length of output” that is put into the truncate module, which I will also explain later. Now that I had this simple setup I had one feed of data that I could use, but I actually decided it would be far more interesting if I could add maybe a couple more streams that weren’t blog posts, like my Flickr photos and Twitter entries.
[...] [BarcampLondon3] Creating a Lifestream with Yahoo Pipes (CristianoBetta) By Kerry It’s all here! [...]
[...] Comments Cristiano on Tech/Life » How to Build Your Own Lifestream with Yahoo Pipes and NO Server Side … on My Barcamp Berlin Presentation on Yahoo PipesReinier Meenhorst on My Barcamp Berlin Presentation [...]
Nice! I built mine (http://360.whatfettle.com) using Venus and keep meaning to present it on a SIMILE timeline ..
Hi Paul. What I like about your version is that show pictures/photos. I was thinking of doing something in SIMILE, but if you add a lot of rich media content that might get a bit confusing quickly.
I had never heard of Venus. What is it? It’s a back-end technology I assume? Thing to remember here is that my project was also kind of an exercise for me to see what Yahoo Pipes and what I could do with it.
[...] This article was originally posted on 23 November 2007 on Cristiano’s own blog. This article is technical but not necessarily complete on the details, keep that in mind. Further more, this article served as the basis for Cristiano’s BarcampLondon3 talk. [...]
[...] Cristiano on Tech/Life ยป How to Build Your Own Lifestream with Yahoo Pipes and NO Server Side Logic – Another post on createing a Lifestream using Yahoo Pipes with no server side code. Just Javascript and HTML [...]
Hi, the pipe debug link in this page is broken.
Which link do you mean?
There is loads of stuff broken, especially the images. My hosting provider lost them by accident and I still haven’t had time to put them back.
It was the one on page four (I didn\’t realise the comments were common across all pages). P.S. thanks for the article!
The link seems to work fine. Maybe you can’t access it because you aren’t logged in. The debug output is only accessible when you are editing the pipe. So go and make an account and start editing your or my pipe.