Mashups for the Nontechies: Yahoo! Pipes Jody Condit Fagan Digital Services Librarian James Madison University

What is Yahoo! Pipes? A tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

“This Pipe annotates Yahoo! Local Results for Napa Wineries with Images from Flickr taken nearby!”

Reminder: This is for NON-TECHIES!

Why read a feed? Stay up to date on the news you need, not all of it! Create a portal using Blogger, iGoogle, Bloglines, to help track incoming streams of data. Only see “new additions”

Why read a feed with Pipes? Combine desired news feeds behind the scenes and deliver the output in just one feed. You want to track 10 blogs but only see entries related to “electronic resources” and get that all in one. You want to get updates on flight deals from Travelocity annotated with photos of the destinations

Why publish a feed? You have info that you want to get to others – The latest news from your library – Rather than sending “cool links” to others via , add them to Furl and invite others to subscribe to your feed. – Provide a list of resources that you can update any time

Why publish a feed with Pipes? You have info that you want to get to others and you want to mash it up with other sources…. – The latest news from your library… with links to Google Maps – Your library’s new titles list … with links to Amazon summaries of those books – Your branch libraries have RSS feeds and you want to offer them all-in-one.

Feed Sources Blogs, wikis, Web sites with RSS feeds Journal alerts Table of Contents alerts Your library’s new library booklist

What can you do with Yahoo! Pipes? Translate feeds into other languages on-the-fly Take multiple feeds and combine them into one feed Show a map with locations related to feed entries Query a data source and return the results as a feed

Why Yahoo! Pipes? You want a more custom solution than existing feed sources and feed readers are able to provide You want to make a custom feed from your library / institution’s feeds without additional back-end programming You want to experiment and learn

Why Not Yahoo! Pipes? You are totally happy with the feeds you read and/or publish You have Web programmers who will cheerfully make custom feeds for you with their mad programming skills You do not want to rely on a third- party solution

Feed and Data Sources

Put the URL of the feed you want in the URL box Every Pipe has a “Pipe Output” This is the “real-time” output of this Pipe!!

(try to do a live example)

(backup screenshot)

A more complex example…

“Fetch Feed” module “Union” module “Sort” module sorts by publication date “Fetch Feed” module Pipe Output

“Fetch Feed” module “Loop” Module “Union” Module Pipe Output

How do you get from simple to complex?

(live examples if time permits)

Where can you read your Pipe’s output? Google Reader Technorati Bloglines RSS-to-Javascript.com will give you a Javascript you can paste onto any web page in the HTML code. (others)

Fun Applications with Yahoo! Pipes Visit Search on these tags from iphoneapp libraries library ical(calendar-based pipes)

Getting Started Create a Yahoo! Account (unless you have one) Use Fetch feed and Output to create your first Pipe Apply any of the Filters to your Pipe Clone someone else’s Pipe and change one thing at a time Do the “Homework!”

Mashups for the Nontechies: Yahoo! Pipes For updated slides / presentation documents, visit