Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Using Yahoo! Pipes to tweak IGN/Gamespot feeds

I was up way too late last night, finally having a chance to play with Yahoo! Pipes, or as it has become known to me, crack pipes. Like any good drug, it's easy to get started, but hard to walk away. All GUI based, drag and drop goodness. I sat in my dimly lit room letting my mind wander. Thinking this is something truly new and innovative... and wondering where to begin. I decided that looking at other people's pipes is a good place to start. But nevermind specifics. I'm here for a purpose.

Problem: IGN and Gamespot both offer PSP rss feeds containing news, updates, reviews, etc. Lot's of information every day. Too much information! It gets to the point where I stop paying attention because the signal/noise ratio is so low. It's all noise, useless posts! I want a feed with just game reviews.

Solution: Pipes lets you take a feed, apply some logic, spit out a new feed, and make it available to the world. In my case, any post that contains 'review' in the title passes through. Every thing else is filtered out. The result is a low volume feed with just game reviews. Here are the two pipes I created:

The filter box, kind of like an if-then in traditional programming, is just one of the many operations available. There seems to be an active community of developers forming and more (advanced) operations will be released in the future.

So when I see you pass me in the hallway at work the next morning trying to hide your red eyes -- relax -- don't look away. I'm hooked on the crack too.

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