Playing with my Pipes

When Yahoo launched Pipes about a year ago I spent a LOT of time playing with it, in fact you could say I got a little bit addicted - but I managed to break the addiction and leave it alone.

I have been back a couple of times since - there has been the odd occasion when I’ve needed to create a custom RSS feed from a number of other feeds - but nothing major.

Well I can now say I’ve spent the best part of the last eight hours playing with Yahoo Pipes and it’s all the fault of Robin Hamman (Cybersoc).

Actually I’m glad he did ask me to have a look at his pipe because I’ve had a great time trying to work out how to make something happen.

I’ve spent the last few hours working on various modules to get an idea of what they all do and how they work oh and how they interact with each other.

Robin is basically trying to create a tool for journalists that makes the process of finding social media comments and content surrounding a big story easier.

You can read the full details on his blog but his eventual goal is for the output of the feed to be generated from a number of search terms - these need to be generated automatically.

So I used the Fetch Feed and Term Extractor modules. The Term Extractor basically strips keywords from the description field of the RSS feed. Then, for the purpose of proving it works I replaced the Description field itself with the new ‘tags’ in my Stripper example.

The next phase is to take those keywords and add them to the rss feeds of major social media services and then output the results of those feeds alongside the original BBC News headlines.

So, for example we’ll use the same story example Robin uses in his post.

You take the story of an Explosion at a pub in Leeds - the stripper gets the keywords pub, leeds, explosion from this.

I then need to build URLs using the URL builder module that creates the rss feed path based on the above criteria (most rss feeds for social media services have an area of the path that reflects a search term - we can build the url in Pipes replacing the search term usually defined by a user input with the term created by stripper.

I then get stuck. How do I go from having a dozen fully built RSS feeds to displaying the results in a usable way within Yahoo Pipes?

All I’ve managed to make them do so far is display the URL - I’ve tried to apply the URLs I’ve created to a ‘Fetch Feeds’ module but I still get the original URL outputed.

Any ideas? How do I customise the way my Pipe displays the data I feed it?

Can I, for example display along the lines of this photoshop mockup or would I need to get dirty with code and build that from scratch?

I’ve come close to closing Pipes, opening Dreamweaver’s code editor and getting down and dirty with PHP but am not 100% certain how to start.

Any tips? I can import and manipulate an RSS feed using ASP (VBScript) but would rather do it using PHP as it seems … well … more appropriate.

While I’m talking about journalism tools - this could work alongside another application I’ve been thinking about building for a while called the JournaCheat.

The idea behind JournaCheat stems from all the talk of living in a Churnalism world. An environment where young journalists are expected to produce an ever increasing amount of content for an ever increasing number of platforms.

JournaCheat would have a number of different tools. One would be the GigR - this is a form that lets you input the details of a gig, a few superlatives and say 10 keywords about the people playing and the venue.

It then provides you with a two well written pieces of copy - a preview of the gig and a review as well. You just need to then get a few photos and Bang! Two articles done without any work.

The same can be done for most stories to be honest - thus giving you more time to work on the investigative pieces that will help you get out of the churnalism rut.

Read the background and reasoning behind UCG Finder on Robin’s brilliant Cybersoc blog.

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