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Yahoo! Pipes doesn’t yet support OPML, so I have been noodling around with a way to maintain a list of feeds that could be used within Pipes to create a “master feed” of all items from all feeds. As it turns out, a Google spreadsheet works pretty well to get the job done.
How to use a spreadsheet in Google Documents as a stand-in for OPML:
1) Create a spreadsheet with a single column. Here is the example spreadsheet I’m using. (You’ll need a Google account to view it; if you don’t have one, you can sign up for one via the same link.) For this example I’m just listing a couple of feeds: The TechBrew feed and Marjolein Hoekstra’s CleverClogs feed.
2) By default the top cell will be considered the column header, so put in something like “Feed URLs” as a reminder that it isn’t used.
3) Add several RSS or Atom feed URLs, one per row in the column.
4) Publish the spreadsheet and note the RSS subscription URL that is provided.
5) Clone this Pipe and use your own spreadsheet subscription URL in the top Fetch module. (I originally had the spreadsheet URL as a parameter to the pipe, but the output was unreliable; sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Pipes is still in Beta, after all.)
How it works:
The RSS generated by the Google Spreadsheet will contain a single item per row, with the content of the cell as the item title.
My pipe extracts that title using the For/Replace operator, plugs it into a Fetch URL, and then replaces the spreadsheet item with all the items in the corresponding feed.
I added a sort by publication date (which really only matters in an HTML viewer), and voila! You now have a master feed from several different sites without OPML. If you auto-publish changes to your spreadsheet, the resulting master feed will be updated accordingly.
A bit un-orthodox, perhaps, but not a bad workaround until Pipes gets OPML support.
7 responses so far ↓
1 JR // Feb 20, 2007 at 9:31 am
To allow people to see that Google Spreadsheet without logging in (or having a google account), you can use the PUBLISH option within Google Docs & Spreadsheets. In fact, if you go to the MORE PUBLISHING OPTIONS link within the publish pane, you can get html to embed the spreadsheet directly in your blog.
btw – this is very cool stuff you posted.
2 Mark Woodman // Feb 20, 2007 at 9:34 am
Thanks, JR. I did use the Publish option (that’s how the RSS feed works), but for some reason it still isn’t visible to non-Googlers. I’ll poke around and see if I missed something.
3 Tony Hirst // Feb 21, 2007 at 5:26 am
Hi Mark-
That’s a neat workaround you have there
FYI, here’s something else you may be interested in: using Grazr to provide a UI to simple Y! pipes: http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/009670.html
tony
4 Rich Tatum // Feb 24, 2007 at 1:36 am
Mark, this is brilliant! I was dreading maintaining 100+ feeds for my site aggregator in Pipes — their UI is not maintenance-friendly, and I was trying to figure out how to trick Pipes into using my OPML file … alas. Google to the rescue!
Brilliant bit of hackery and creativity.
Thanks,
Rich
BlogRodent
5 Kevin Cheng // Mar 4, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Mark,
Spreadsheet as an RSS feed is definitely a good way of feeding Pipes a lot of data at once. Hopefully some people will be inspired by this to think of other uses as well. One thing I\’m curious about is what you tried in terms of making the spreadsheet url a parameter. You said that it was somewhat unreliable in output and it\’s possible I have the fix for it. It turns out that the parameter name in text inputs have a bit of undocumented restrictions which we will be fixing. For the moment though, make sure the name for your parameter is lowercase and does not contain any spaces or special characters (the prompt can be anything you want).
If that doesn\’t work, let me know what the Pipe is and maybe we can take a look at why it\’s unreliable.
Kevin
Pipes Team
6 SeekMocha // Jun 20, 2007 at 9:21 am
Contrary to Google’s claims for the application, numerous users report that the “publish” option for Google spreadsheets is NOT allowing non-google members to view the spreadsheet.
7 Léo // May 23, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Hey, thanks!
It was absolutely usefull!
BTW, do you know any easy way from exporting a list with all feeds link from Google Reader? I mean, for making steps 1 to 4 a single step.
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