Geekblok

With a plethora of social websites, it’s hard to keep track of everything. And like with all itches, people will try to make money out of it and come up with sites like FriendFeed, Lifestream, etc.

But what if you want to build something similar yourself? You’d have to download all your RSS feeds, combine them and most likely filter and sort them. Yahoo! Pipes comes in handy!

Yahoo! Pipes can do all the dirty work in aggregating the feeds for you and more importantly, it’s rather fun to use. So let’s get started. Say you want to use your Twitter, Last.fm, Flickr, Del.icio.us and blog feeds. First we’ll create a new pipe and simply fetch the feeds we need.

Tada! your feeds are now all combined and working together, but wait, I also want my blog’s posts in there, but only my posts (and in this case, not the ones by Bok and Joffie!). Ok, let’s just fetch the feed of this blog and only permit entries where I am listed as author.

Not too hard, right? But you probably also want to sort it by date, and limit it to, say, three days? First we’ll drop all the “old” entries (older than three days).

Ok, only sort the entries by date, and we’re done!

Now we have one big feed of all your information, which you can publish somewhere (and probably format nice). The feed can be downloaded in RSS, JSON or PHP (serialized) format, so you can start from there.

Yahoo! Pipes now downloads and parses/handles the feeds for you, so you won’t have to do that. Very cool, very cool indeed. And of course the interface is a lot of fun and pleasing to the eye.