On my Wordpress sidebar you’ll see a list of links called “Delicious.com favorites”. Those links are an auto-generated mashup of my del.icio.us and Google Reader Shared items*. All I have to do is hit the “share button” in G Reader or my browser’s del.icio.us button and links are automatically published to my sidebar for your enjoyment.
To create RSS mashups with Yahoo Pipes you just have to know how to find RSS feeds (they often look like 
in webpages or in your URL bar).
Here’s how it works:
- Find the RSS feed URLs from your Google Reader Shared page, del.icio.us page, or any site with a public RSS feed.
- Plug those URLs into Yahoo Pipes’ “Fetch Feed” widget. If you can’t find the RSS feed URL, the “Fetch Site Feed” widget can find it for you. (To illustrate this I’ve used both widgets, and piped them through a “Union” widget).
- Filter duplicate entries out of the raw mashup. This way if you bookmark the same item in two different web apps the duplicates won’t show up in your feed. I used “item.link” as my filter because even if I change the title of a page the link will stay unique.
- Next sort the mashup by descending date and plug it into “Pipe Output”.
- Click “Save” then “Run Pipe” and you’re done!
I use the KB Advanced RSS Widget for Wordpress in my sidebar but any RSS blog widget should work. Of course you can also subscribe to the RSS mashup with any feed reader.
Here are some non-blog things you can do with Pipes:
- Ego surfing – Say you wanted to automate your sad self-Googling habit. Just plug your name into MS Live Search, Google Blog Search, and Yahoo Search, grab the URLs of the RSS feeds they generate, and paste the URLs into Yahoo Pipes. Now you have an up to the minute feed – with no duplicates – of what people are saying about you.
- Filter out news you don’t want – Dan at UneasySilence used Pipes to filter out iPhone hysteria.
- Create a feed of YouTube videos based on the top 10 iTunes music sales
- A Craigslist, Maps, Email, and Pipes apartment search mashup that even I don’t understand
- Pipes’ list of popular pipes
Pipes can be a tough nut to crack if you’re not steeped in this RSS stuff, but once you set it up it’s totally worth it. If you have any questions or need help post in the comments and I’ll see what I can do for you. Just think of me as your friendly neighborhood unpaid technical consultant.
* Hints/Caveats
- Sharing from Google Reader is good because it just takes one button click.
- But Google Reader is bad because: 1) You can’t change the headline of the item for your sidebar (like if the headline isn’t descriptive or is too long). 2) Not every website you want to link in your sidebar is something you’ve subscribed to in Google Reader. This is really the whole reason I wanted to mashup my social bookmarks.
- Del.icio.us is good because you can change the headlines and descriptions before you share them.
- I don’t share all my del.icio.us items because many of them aren’t of general interest. Instead I made a del.icio.us tag called “nb” and have Pipes get the feed just for that tag.
- Note that new items might take a while to show up in your sidebar. This is because Wordpress only fetches external RSS once an hour to save processing power.
