I’ve been playing around with Yahoo Pipes, which I think is pretty cool. The UI alone is exceptionally clever, and pretty intuitive.
A number of things I’d like to be able to do:
- Add text annotations anywhere on my diagram to remind myself how / why I am doing something. Code comments rule 🙂
- Reformat between RSS and Atom. I’d prefer my output to be Atom in most cases.
- Validate feeds.
- Filter out or rewrite the content of individual elements within a feed. I’d like to be able to strip out IMG tags, for instance. Or rewrite dates or URLs. Currently I can block all content that contains images, but maybe I’d like to be able to just strip images from the output, leaving the rest of the (text) content. I’d like to be able to reformat dates and URLs to match the spec (so that broken pubDates match the RFC-822 standard, for instance).
Question on this last one though – I’d essentially be modifying the content – is this “the done thing”? Even when the source is horribly broken?
Anyway, hopefully the service will continue to be enhanced. It is very impressive.
What you’d like to do are reasonable things, Andy. What concerns me about Yahoo Pipes is that it’s hosted. So we can’t let anything flow through the pipes that isn’t fit for external consumption.
Indeed. Sounds like you just volunteered yourself for your latest internal project there, Martin 😉
What makes you think I didn’t know that? 🙂