The main aim of the this blog and the Yahoo Pipe is to share an aggregated feed for relevant SMM feeds in one central place.
So here is a brief overview of Yahoo Pipes and the SMM Pipe that has been created.
Pipes Editor
The Pipes editor is where all the development begins. You will notice there are three distinct panes:
- The Library pane, this is where all the various modules and saved Pipes are located.
- The Canvas pane, this is where all the magic happens – build your Pipe fortress!
- The Debugger pane – see the output of your Pipes as you are plugging away at development.
The SMM Pipe
The idea for this blog came from having an interest in Social Media, a new domain kicking around and the curiosity to see what Yahoo Pipes could actually do – and also in that it just may be a useful resource… for those involved in SMM or online marketing.
It uses quite a few modules from the many available. So let’s have a little gander of how it works:
Click here for a larger SMM Yahoo Pipe Diagram- you can see the SMM Pipe in action for yourself.
Summary of Steps 1 – 5
Feeds Entrance Points & Filtering
The aim here is to separate blogs that have a significant amount related to SMM and those that are only Partially related. Those that are partially related will be filtered by category, to give a SMM grouping of as relevant posts as currently possible with my newly acquired and novice Pipes skills!
At first glance, I was pleasantly surprised by its ease of use and array of features - until it became apparent there were a few minor issues. The first being that some of the hyperlinks from posts pointed to post’s FeedBurner url and not the original post. Some digging around on the Pipes discussion board showed me that this is where the Regex module could come in handy. Coincidentally, Matt Magee recently noticed a similar link love probelm with SearchEngineLand.
Step 1
This is where all the SMM feeds that need filtering by category, and have FeedBurner urls that resolve correctly enter. It uses the Fetch-URL module to gather these feeds.
Step 2
Step 2a. again uses the Fetch-URL module and is connected to 2b. – the Renex module. This module has been customised to translate dodgy FeedBurner urls into its native state – I can not tell you why, but I can tell you how to correct it. Go to the SMM Pipe (you will need a Yahoo login) – there you can view the modules and even clone the Pipe - you will see the parameters that you need to pass into the Renex module to resolve the issue.
Step 3
Step 3a. makes use of the Union module. It combines the feeds from step 1 & 2. - 3b. introduces the Filter module which is very useful for this pipe – it has been set to on allow blog posts that have been categorised by a certain keyword or keyphrase. In this case the keyword ‘social’ has been used to funnel out categories such as social media and social networking – I have also added variations of the spelling of linkbaiting and linkbait. This is a great module, although it did not work with all the blogs – I suspect that this may be to do with blogs that have been custom built or had some degree of customisation and they do not follow the popular blogging software configurations.
Step 4
Step 4. is pretty similar to step 2. – the only real difference is that there isn’t a filter applied to it. You will see that the Fetch-URL and Renex modules are again used to ensure that the original blog post urls are shown and not the FeedBurner ones.
Step 5
Likewise, step 5. is a parallel of step 3. – with the omission of a filter following it. Feeds that enter through here do not need their hyperlinks being transformed, I am still at loss as to why some do and why some don’t!
Step 6
The Union module is used to combine the four Fetch-Url modules. These modules being the four entry point for the RSS feeds – 1, 2a, 4a & 5.
Step 7
By default, Yahoo Pipes does not output the domain name in the title of a post. As this is an aggregated feed for many different blogs, I thought this addition would be pretty helpful.
This leads to my next pit stop in the Pipes discussion boards to see if this could be done – it turns out that yes it can and would require three more modules. 7a. the URL Input module that connects to 7b. the String Concatenate module – allowing for the ability to show the domain name to be optional; the default for this Pipe is set to be shown.
7c. The customised Renex module provides the final nuts and bolts in ensuring the domain name of a post is shown in the aggregated title for all posts.
Step 8
Step 8a. uses the URL Input module. This can be used to do quite a lot of clever things such as piping values into other modules or pipes. This module simply allows the user to enter the amount of posts that they wish to see in one viewing and is attached to 8b. the Truncate module. 8b. is also connected to 7c.
Step 9
This step uses the Unique module to ensure there are no duplicate posts.
Step 10
With the SMM Pipe coming to a close, the penultimate Sort module provides the ability to sort by most recent posts first.
Step 11
Voila – the end result, the Output module – all the Piped out aggregated posts. Job done!
I developed the best part of this Pipe over a month ago, so I am sure there is likely be a more refined way to put it all together, although this is what has worked for me then and I hope it works for you too.
Any improvements/suggestions are gladly welcome! You can clone the pipe here and play around with the various modules available – if you are Geek, have some fun! If you are not, then reading this far makes you a wannabe Geek! Think I’d rather be a Geek…
3 responses so far ↓
1 mblair // May 3, 2007 at 6:18 am
Is the sort module working better these days to actually respect post times? When it first rolled out it was buggy and didn’t really sort properly.
2 joe // May 3, 2007 at 6:55 pm
I have not seen any problems sorting by dates - Although I have not paid too much attention looking at times.
There do seem to be some niggly bugs - but hey, it is beta I suppose…
3 Garret Levine // Sep 4, 2008 at 11:01 pm
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