How to Build Your Own Lifestream with Yahoo Pipes and NO Server Side Logic
Step 1: Combine Your Blog Posts
I actually started this project to see if I could combine my RSS feeds from FourStarters.com and Blog.CristianoBetta.com into one actual RSS feed combining all MY posts. This included some filtering to remove posts not from me (sorry guys) and sorting this new RSS feed by date. I ended up looking at Yahoo Pipes and mashed up the data into one.
Yahoo Pipes proved to be pretty sufficient for this problem The clue in making a nice Pipe is pretty simple. Drop some modules from the left sidebar into the canvas on the right and connect the pipes by dragging lines between the anchors of the modules. The most useful modules for creating a lifestream are the Fetch Feed and the Union modules, but for a more extensive overview of how I made my Yahoo Pipe take a look at the feed source. If you don’t understand the workings of a module, take a look at the help files of the module by pressing the -?- icon.
For my first Yahoo Pipe I used the Fetch Feed, Sort, Unifion, and Filter modules like below (click to view):
Take a good look at the pipe above to see what I did (the actual pipe can be found here). There are a couple of tricks I am doing here, one of them was to I use the rename and regex modules to create a new entry in every post that says this is a blog post. This proved to be useful later on so keep on reading.
Additionally you see a little module called “length of output” that is put into the truncate module, which I will also explain later. Now that I had this simple setup I had one feed of data that I could use, but I actually decided it would be far more interesting if I could add maybe a couple more streams that weren’t blog posts, like my Flickr photos and Twitter entries.
