Yahoo! Pipes in action

Yesterday and today I spent some time to set up Yahoo! pipes.
The result are two public pipes which merge the content of several RSS feeds and each emits a new feed.

The Companies pipe will be more interesting for broader audience. It gets information from the blogs of really trend-setting web companies. Currently I have included Google, Yahoo! UI Theater, IBM alpha works, Netvibes and RememberTheMilk. The entries are modified in order easily to recognize where they have come from. I have included labels with their source. They are sorted chronologically as well.

I had to work a lot on creating readable entries because some of the feeds are in format which is not processed well by Yahoo! Pipes. One example is how Yahoo! Pipes processes a set of elements with the same name. I had to try a lot of stuff until I realized that I can access an element with index 0 using the following notation: item.element.0. I am glad that I could manage it because the documentation contains only the basics.

The other pipe is focused on accessibility. The web sites whose feeds are aggregated are as follows: W3C WAI - the Web Accessibility Initiative of W3C, WebAIM and Juicy Studio. W3C WAI prepares guidelines for web accessibility and reviews web standards with respect to accessibility. WebAIM is a commercial organization and Juicy Studio is an independent UK web site. Any news about accessibility probably will be covered there.

These are my first tries for pipes. I plan to create more with different thematics. An example could be a pipe for the upcoming scientific conferences. The two pipes will evolve as well, new sources will be added there.

I have included both of my pipes in my Netvibes start page. I am waiting impatiently for the Netvibes Ginger release so that I can share my pipes and other widgets with friends.