Pipes is one of the best kept secrets on the web. It's great at quickly mashing up a few data sources and exposing it as a web service, with optional json/xml/kml/xxx output out of the box. Also it's totally cached so even expensive pipes run quickly after the first call.
I'd love to use this project in order to effortlessly migrate pipes to python once they get too complicated, require something pipes lacks, or become important to a business.
Can someone tell me one really good way Yahoo Pipes is being used?
I can't seem to find something that is tangible and usable. Most of the site deals with developers, and some of them sometimes are more concerned with the language/tools of the application rather than making something that other people can understand or relate to.
I use it to trawl Craigslist when I'm looking for a specific kind of vehicle. To give you 2 examples why this is useful - First, you can search a couple nearby CL areas at the same time. Second, people enter "Mazda RX7" many different ways- such as "Mazda RX-7" or "RX7"- and you can also search for both "1988 Mazda RX7" and "88 Mazda RX7" and combine the results. Thus, once you identify your criteria and thoughtfully consider the queries you should run, you won't have to dig through the website anymore, and only ever see the results you care about with excellent accuracy- I did some manual double-checking at first to make sure I wasn't missing ham, and I'd say I was getting 95% of the ham. It's also easy to filter out the spam.
Plus, new results are delivered within 60 minutes of being posted, so if it's a really hot deal I won't be out of the loop.
One: I would tweet announcements for @asuSoDA, the Software Developers Association I ran at Arizona State U. But these are easy to miss, especially if one doesn’t use Twitter, so I used Pipes to clean up the RSS feed Twitter published, stripping the redundant nature of each tweet starting with "asusoda:", for instance.
Two: A professor published homework and grades online, by adding a paragraph starting with date. I used another tool that scrapes HTML into RSS, then piped this into Y! Pipes, where I used regexes to not only give the RSS entries nice titles, but also linked to homework details pages, which had guessable names but the professor did not link to from the announcement pages. So if his note including the phrase /[Hh]omework ([0-9]+)/, I would wrap this in <a> tags as appropriate.
He's using Google Charts (http://code.google.com/apis/chart/). The center piece is actually several charts with transparent backgrounds layered over each other, and the right and bottom are two more separate charts.
Does anyone know if it is actually possible to use Yahoo! Pipes commercially?
I have always wanted to use Pipes, but unless I am misreading the Terms of Use (1.f.iv), it seems to suggest that you are not allowed to derive any income from any service that uses it.
Sell, lease, share, transfer, or sublicense Yahoo! Pipes or derive income from the use of Yahoo! Pipes in conjunction with Yahoo! APIs or other web services, whether for direct commercial or monetary gain or otherwise, without Yahoo!'s prior, express, written permission;
Brilliant promotional strategy you've got there Yahoo.
I'm perplexed as to why a company releases a brilliant product (I love graphical programming compared to coding) and then discourages people from using it for anything serious. No wonder they're in decline.
It's wonderful. I cannot wait to use it. Because now you have actual control about your pipe, but still able to use the easy gui. Useful for every quick project.
I'd love to use this project in order to effortlessly migrate pipes to python once they get too complicated, require something pipes lacks, or become important to a business.