Skip to content

Creating Custom Feeds with Yahoo Pipes

2007 September 16
tags: ,
by Barry

I’ve had a bookmark folder on Yahoo Pipes for about 6 months now, something I’ve put aside for a rainy day.

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

I’m a firm believer than nothing is worth doing until you need it, and over the weekend I got my opportunity. I’m a big rugby fan, and always on the lookout for some news related to my team (Leinster), but this can be quite difficult due to the various locations news items might pop up.

So after doing some research and viewing different websites which provide rugby news, as well as online editions of newspapers and the competition sites which Leinster compete in, I decided to pull in the various feeds, into one central feed that I can subscribe to.

The key site to get the official line from is LeinsterRugby.ie, unfortunately the quality of this website and the other official Irish rugby sites are rather poor.

I’ve created a Yahoo Pipe, to gather News Feeds from the main websites which carry rugby news and filter them based on containing “Leinster” in either the item description or title, the filter can be modified for any team.

rugby Creating Custom Feeds with Yahoo Pipes

The pipe essentially pulls in feeds from locations which will possibly contain Leinster news, such as independent.ie, rugby.ie, BBC Sport, Magnersleague.com and ERCRugby.com (Heineken Cup). As well as those, I’ve also added sites such as MunsterRugby.ie and ConnaughtRugby.ie for future use. LeinsterRugby.ie does not have an up to date working RSS feed despite having up to date news, the news section is coded in such a manner than even deriving a feed from the content is impossible for now.

The source pipe can be found here – http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=arMT1OBj3BGnHTF3yjUFzw

I’ve also pulled each of the relevant inputs into separate feeds in Feedburner; this will allow me to upgrade the source pipe with any new feed URL’s, while still using the Feedburner link (as well as all the goodness of the feedburner service)

For now, Only Munster and Connaught offer feeds from their official websites, while Leinster certainly don’t offer anything valid, and Ulster have links to ‘What is RSS’ but no actual feeds.

I’ll revisit this with an update regarding the state of Irish Rugby sites (the amount of money spent by the Union isn’t worth thinking about) as well as probably writing a custom script to pull Leinster news items from the rather poorly constructed site.

from → Websites