What is Yahoo Pipes?
Yahoo Pipes is an internet application developed by Yahoo! which allows users to create data mashups by aggregating web feeds, RSS feeds, web pages, and various services. The user is provided with a graphical user interface (GUI) with which to build the data mashups. In simple terms, the application enables users to pipe information from various sources then set up guidelines on how these information and content should be modified and published. Built by Daniel Raffel, Jonathan Trevor, Pasha Sadri, Kevin Cheng, and Ed Ho back in 2007, Yahoo Pipes is a great tool for organizing data and information online. Whether you are a blogger, a website builder, an internet marketer, or just the casual web surfer, you can find a lot of benefits in using Yahoo Pipes.
The main objective of Yahoo Pipes is to help people build new pages from several sources by simply aggregating their RSS feeds. The application features several modules that are the tools you are going to use in grabbing data from several sources or in editing these data. These said modules have been grouped into certain categories. These categories are user inputs, URL, sources, operators, date, number, string and location. Let us look more into how these categories are used below.
- Sources – The modules in this Yahoo Pipes category are utilized to get data and information from one or several sources on the web.
- User Inputs – As the name implies, the modules contained in this category allow you to add an input into a pipe. You can add either text, location, URL, number, or date into the pipe.
- Operators – Once there is data flowing in the pipe, you can use the modules in this category to transform or filter said data. The modules in this Yahoo Pipes category include filter, location extractor, regex, reverse, split, tail, union, web service, count, loop, rename, sort, sub-element, truncate, and unique.
- URL – There is only one module in this category and that is the URL builder module. This is one of the most important Yahoo Pipes modules because you need to have the URLs of RSS feeds in order for the pipes to work and function. It is easy using the URL builder because you can create URLs without typing the web address. The module utilizes query parameters and a base URL to come up with other URLs.
- String – The modules in this category are string builder, string replace, term extractor, string regex, sub string, and translate. These are used to either combine or modify the strings.
- Date – This Yahoo Pipes category contains two modules: the date formatter and the date builder. The date builder converts text to dates while the date formatter takes the dates and changes them to the desired formats.
- Location – This Yahoo Pipes module converts location descriptions into geographical locations.
- Number – This contains the simple math module. This module applies math operations to the numbers inputted into it. It then outputs the results of the said math operations.
These are the most basic things you need to know about Yahoo Pipes.
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