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Search Barbelith with Yahoo Pipes

20:52 / 22.07.08

I've been mucking about with and learning Yahoo Pipes lately. This is a way for non-programmers like me to play around with RSS feeds, searches, maps and lots of other goodies. I'm using it at work to build various tools for myself, but I've become kind of obsessed of late and have been working at home as well each night.

Well, here is a fruit of my labour. Another search engine for Barbelith. Still a few bugs here and there and I have plans, big plans to improve it. So use it if you like and let's use this thread for a general chat about Pipes. Anybody else using it? If you are the slightest bit computer geeky I recommend it if only to help control the onslaught of RSS feeds that most people seem to have.

15:11 / 23.07.08

I don't get "pipes" really, but have only a passing familiarity with RSS stuff.

This is a little slower than the "newsearch.php" thing, but it does return useful (and slightly different?) results.

What does it *do*, exactly?

19:27 / 23.07.08

Well, this one has just been an experiment and I will tidy it up and add features as I learn more. e.g. I was playing with the map feature that pulls location info from the post contents and puts a marker on a map. Cool. So you hypothetically search for Radiohead. Up comes a map with a marker on Brighton and a link to the post about the Radiohead concert in Brighton.

I am making a lot of cool things at work with them e.g. a persistent Google search for hotels in a certain area of London, which then extracts various bits of info that I need from the Google Local page for those hotels and presents it in a new RSS feed which can be automatically sucked into my database with all fields populated correctly (80% working right now).

If you're a non-coder but like tinkering with computers I really recommend it. It is fun and pretty useful too.

15:30 / 26.07.08

Here's another one just for you Grant, based on your Flickr interests. Subscribe to it in your feed reader of choice and receive the top 10 weekly pictures from the Gallery of Astronaut Photography of Earth. I made this one as the website itself has no RSS feeds, so it calls the page and extracts the relevant links and titles to build my own RSS feed. Neat.

17:45 / 26.07.08

I'm going to have to start a reader up, aren't I.

I love APOD!