Yahoo Pipes VS Google Docs Feed Reader

Recently there was an article on Digital Inspiration about the ways to used Google Docs Spread Sheet as an RSS aggregator. Its pretty neat. I tried it with few regular feeds I read and I must say its good.

As with other documents, if you choose to publish the Feed Aggregator Spread Sheet, you can share the page with others. What was not very clear in the article of Digital Inspiration and other documents dealing with this, was the Query and how I can further improve upon this idea.

For people, who have not yet figured out how to use the "Query" Field of ImportFeed(URL, Query, Title, Number Of Items), here is a short explanation (limited by my own understanding :) )

If Cell A1 has the feed url, ex: http://feeds.labnol.org/labnol

then in any other vacant cell, you enter the following:

=Import(A1,"Items Title",FALSE,10)

here:

1. A1, - is the cell number of the feed
2. "Items Title" - is the query which will fetch the Title of the latest feeds
3. FALSE - to denote that we dont want the title of the different fields to be displayed.
4. finally 10 - is the number of feed entries to be copied to successive Spread Sheer Cells

The query can be :

1. "Items Title"; Very obvious.
   
2. "Items Author"; very obvious.
   
3. "Items Description"; Synopsis of the article
   
4. "Items Publishing Date" ; I do not know the exact query, I never use this
   
5. "Items URL"; the link to the article.

I found one major drawback when I published a test feed aggregator as HTML file. The URL is copied as text, and is not clickeable. Yes it might be possible to hack and make it a valid URL, but it would have been excellent appropriate HTML tags were added to the published document.


During the same period, I was experimenting with Yahoo Pipes. I had just then come accross Pipes on some web page, and I was just descovering the features of Pipes. I admit, I am still a very novice, when writing web applications. But, Yahoo Pipes is fantastic.

The same application of a Feed aggregator explained in the above section can be done in a jiffy. By adding one component. I suggest you try pipes if you have Yahoo Account. Its much more organised than GDocs hack to aggregate feeds. What's more, you can export the Pipes in various formats.

I am not sure if the above block of pipes code is going to work in the blogger or not. But I have placed just few lines, which is a feed reader of Armstrong Photographgy

You always wanted to download great pictures from Flickr without any distractions of various tags etc, right? now you can create your own pipe which filters any thing unwanted and presents you with just right pictures.