Yahoo! Pipes is for sure one of the most exciting recently released toy and I was desperately seeking a reason to play around with it.
Why climb a mountain?
Because it’s there.
Sir Edmund Hillary
So today I tried to find Bengal cats for sale in and around Vienna. Yahoo! Pipes helped me to merge existing content of different sites regarding Bengal cats in Vienna to a single feed, filter it by my chosen keywords and re-publish it as RSS feed again. As result I get noticed by my RSS reader whenever a new Bengal cat is available for sale in Vienna.
The tricky part was to integrate a site without existing feed. Yahoo! Pipes doesn’t provide comprehensive content analysis of non-feed-content out of the box. So I used Dapper instead to transform HTML content into a valid RSS feed and pipe it through my Vienna Bengal cat search pipe.
Funny thing, those pipes… but one problem I still have is that if one source fails the whole pipe screws up.