When it comes to tech stuff, I’m the kind of person that is all about trying new things … the problem is that I usually need a reason for it.
I discovered Yahoo! Pipes a little bit ago, but never had a real reason to do anything with it. Well, I did, but I guess it didn’t quite work the way I had hoped.
My fiancee is actively pursuing employment and regularly monitors 50+ sites (mad kudos because I had no idea she was monitoring so many). Offering to make our lives a little easier, I turned again to Yahoo! Pipes.
For those of you not familiar, Yahoo! Pipes allows you to take data and do all kinds of interesting things with it in the form of mash-ups. For example, someone took a Craigslist feed of apartments and the data from Google Maps and fed it through a pipe. The result was a list of the apartments along with their locations on the map. The possibilities are endless, especially when you combine that with data that is dynamic.
Now, Yahoo! Pipes doesn’t exactly have the shortest learning curve. So, naturally I scoured for tutorials. Now I bring you to ‘Feedity‘. Now, if Yahoo! Pipes has a short learning curve, this one is just a wee bit longer. The genius of Feedity is that you can specify areas of a web page that you want to have transformed into an RSS feed. It does the rest.
What does that mean? I’ll tell you what it means – we don’t have to search 50+ pages anymore. The listings come right into an RSS reader (like Thunderbird) or in my case, my Google account where I view all of the listings at once. See the pic:
Even if you think taking the effort to do something like this is pretty … dorky, you still have to appreciate that it’s pretty neat.
Until next time …
-D