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Entries in opml (3)

Wednesday

Mar112009

Yahoo Pipes - Recent News feed for widget (on the right)

20090311 at 13:22

Here is the published Pipe that powers my Recent News widget on Soft Machine: OPML feed items newest 20 with [source] prepended

There are a few details I don't need to go into, at the moment... One thing I will say, however, is that the aggregator pipes I looked at either didn't work or were extremely inefficient. Others weren't suitable, or were fragile, or very specific to a task. This Pipe is general, efficient, and quite good at producing recent items from OPML files. The only ongoing upkeep required is to re-export my subscriptions to the cloud when I make changes I want to see reflected here! In all, I'd say the capabilities of Yahoo Pipes are good, but you may not find what you need easily. [caption id="attachment_152" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Recent News Pipe for Soft Machine"]

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demo | tagged

aggregator,

feed,

google reader,

news,

opml,

rss

richardwalker | |

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Yahoo Pipes - OPML items

20090311 at 10:36

UPDATE: added optional filter on “folder name” for a more selective list of items.

Here is my published OPML items pipe. Here is the Y! message board thread.

This is the first step in solving what I consider to be the distressing state of OPML support in Yahoo Pipes. A very simple fix, it consists of setting up a pipe that parses an OPML file (such as you find when “exporting” subscriptions from Google reader), and outputs the subscription items. I take care to handle both “flat” and “structured” OPML files. Note, I recognize the “flat” items by filtering on “item.type” having “rss” or “atom.” [caption id=”attachment_142” align=”alignnone” width=”550” caption=”First, the flat items”][/caption] [caption id=”attachment_143” align=”alignnone” width=”550” caption=”Then, the children”][/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_156” align=”alignnone” width=”550” caption=”the coup-de-grace”]

[/caption]

demo | tagged

atom,

demo,

google reader,

opml,

rss,

yahoo pipes

richardwalker | |

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Wednesday

Mar112009

Yahoo Pipes OPML FAIL (Google Reader)

20090311 at 03:24

Go to My Yahoo Pipes if you want to verify or play along: “BROKEN Fetch OPML -do aggregate …”

I went to add a simple feature on this site: a list of entries from blogs I like. Also known as a widget showing a magic RSS feed. Enter Yahoo Pipes. Should be simple enough, except I discovered that almost every OPML parser in use is broken with regard to google reader. I have many many subscriptions, so I create a number of folders for organization. Because I use google reader as my "master" feed subscription list, I think it's important to get these basic tools right. I'm going to solve this step by step, starting with a better method for parsing the xml, to handle "nested" OPML a la google reader. Folders are empty parent items with a no URL or "type=rss", just "text", "title", and children.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<opml version="1.0">
  ...
 <body>
  <outline title="arts" text="arts">
   <outline text="Civic Center" title="Civic Center" type="rss" xmlUrl= ...

So, to summarize: FetchData & Yahoo Pipes Help are deficient, and all the OPML aggregation examples I’ve tested are broken. They use FetchData to make an item list out of body.outline, so you get a list of “folders”, instead of the actual feeds.