Flexible Pipes

Cole Camplese's blog post ‘As a Public Service, Let Me Repeat that RSS Rocks’ has me thinking about Yahoo Pipes again. Cole's experiment is a nice, simple, clean demo of feed aggregation using Google Reader (a great probuct, BTW) that is just the thing for sites with a very sharp focus on specific topics. Especially easy and intuitive is the ability to aggregate feeds using tags to simulate a file system organization. The problem I ran into with Google Reader is too little control of sorting and filtering content, with too much unrelated content.

That led me to think about pipes. Here's the use case: I want to aggregate feeds about Python, Zope, Plone and the WebLion project. Since Pythonistas are somewhat passionate about the elegance of their language, they can get a bit wordy and wide-ranging and off my chosen topics. So, for our readers benefit I wanted to limit posts about Python to subjects related to Zope and Plone. Pipes has the filtering operators I need, and can be combined in very precise ways. The result is the PythonZopePlonePipe. Clone it, mash it, put it in a pipe and smoke it.

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