So I might be about 18 months late, but I finally got around to playing with Yahoo! Pipes today. I was aware of the basic concept but I was not aware of how impressive the implementation is. It’s an incredibly powerful tool with a slick UI that allows you to perform some pretty complex data processing without doing any real programming.
For my first experimental pipe, I just had it aggregate and sort the feed from this blog, my Google Reader shared links feed and my Flickr photostream feed. Easy-peasy.
Things got a bit more interesting when I tried to add my Last.fm “loved tracks” (favourites) to this super DanFeed. This is because Last.fm doesn’t actually have a feed for “loved tracks”. It has a feed for all recently played tracks, but I can’t really see the point of this because, with one entry every 3 or 4 minutes, it’s too much information for even the most dedicated stalker to digest.
Last.fm does however have a REST API to provide access to its data. Yahoo! Pipes is not restricted to processing RSS and Atom feeds. It can also extract data from JSON, CSV, arbritrary XML and even plain old HTML pages, so it didn’t take very long to get at the data I wanted.
After a little bit of trial-and-error I was able to include album art thumbnails in the feed too (for feed-readers that will display them). The only thing that wasn’t intuitive was how Pipes deals with dates for RSS entries. There was a lot of head-scratching before I finally succeeded in getting the dates from the Last.fm XML into the Pipes RSS.
The result of all of this is that I have published my first (semi-)useful Pipe, one that allows you to share your favourite tracks with your friends. In effect, they can subscribe your recommendations. The pipe is here. Just type in a Last.fm username and press the button. You can get a link to your personalised RSS feed from the output page. If you want to embed the feed (including the thumbnail images) on your website/blog/Facebook/whatever, just click on “Get as a Badge” after generating your custom feed.