Jon Holato

To better illustrate my previous post in which I introduced and explained Yahoo Pipes, I decided to make my own and share it with all of you. My Yahoo Pipe is called Jon Holato Via Flickr, and is essentially my blog in Flickr pictures. Let me explain.

There are 4 pipes, or filters, in Jon Holato Via Flickr. The first pipe is called fetch. This pipe has the job of pulling in a data source from somewhere on the internet. In this case, the data source is the RSS feed from this blog. The second pipe is called truncate, and is simply a limiter for the data source, where I am saying that I only want the 10 most recent items from the data source. The third pipe is called content analysis, and simply means that the data source will be parsed and any keywords or key phrases will be extracted and placed into a variable that we can use at a later time. The fourth and final pipe is where things get a bit complicated, as there is a Flickr image search inside of a for each: replace loop. There’s really no easy way of explaining this, but basically once the data source reaches this pipe/filter, the pipe grabs each item from the data source one-by-one (remember we limited it to 10 total in the 2nd pipe) and searches Flickr for up to 20 images that match the description of the variables we assigned at the 3rd pipe. Once it has finished going through each item in the data source, the entire pipe system gets processed and the result gets returned to the browser.
Here is how the pipe looks in Yahoo’s Pipe Editor:

And here is the end result once the pipe has been completed. Notice the wide array of subscription options available on the right-hand side of the screen.