ANTIQUES SHOPS

Clicking the small arrow at the end of the URL field, will send Pipes in search of the specified RSS feed. Once the feed is located the Fetch Feed box — for lack of a better term — changes color. Grabbing the circle at the bottom of this box allows the user to connect the RSS feed to the Pipe Output. The titles from the RSS feed’s items are displayed in a debugger at the bottom of the interface.

Back in the Fetch Feed dialog box, a second RSS feed may be added. Simply click the plus sign next to the work URL. A second URL field will appear, and the new RSS feed URL may be pasted in place. Now the new Pipe is aggregating items from two distinct feeds.

Moving to the Operators modules in the left hand navigation, a filter may be applied to the Pipe. In the example, the Pipe will be excluding any items with titles that contain the term “SEO.”

To save a feed, simple click “Save” in the upper right. Once the Pipe is saved, it can be located under My Pipes on the Pipes website, and even published. For example, the Pipe created for this article is available for anyone to see.

Finally, the pipe can be added to a website as a Pipes Badge. Simply click the “Get as a Badge” link from the Pipe’s page to get the embed code necessary to add the Pipe to any website.

Summing Up

The example feed could be used to stay up-to-date about trends in ecommerce. Using similar techniques, Internet merchants can create any number of Pipes that collect articles, seek out business intelligence, or provide content from product detail pages.

Pipes may also be used to open and read spreadsheets, interact with web services, and output RSS feeds for others to use.

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