Yahoo Pipes for Non Programmers

By Michael Gray
In Tools

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I’ve been playing with Yahoo Pipes on and off for the past few days and have to say it’s incredibly cool, wicked, and way powerful. Problem is if you aren’t a programmer it might as well be written in Woodland Elvish, cause you’ll never figure it out. I’m no master programmer but I get by and that thing just has me confused as all get out. Reminds me of Google Co-Op when it first came out, so needlessly un-user friendly only a unix admin could love it. Thank $Diety they replaced it with custom search engine which is so simple a trained monkey could use it. So c’mon somebody write the Yahoo Pipes for Non-programmers guide, I’ll personally digg it and throw some link love your way if you can help me understand it.

Update:
Added for people curious what I’m talking about look at the Techcrunch pipe and Digg user Pipe in My Pipe Account

Popularity: 6% [?]

{ 6 comments }

Matt McGee February 14, 2007 at 2:08 am: Agreed 100%, MG. I was just trying to mess with it last night. I keep thinking there’s got to be something cool you can do with local search results, or maybe inbound link counts … not those two tied together, but as separate Pipes to make.

I don’t know… I haven’t seen anything impressive being done with it yet. You?
sdlfasdlf February 14, 2007 at 4:07 am: I created a test very quickly without any problems whatsoever. The only thing I couldn’t figure out is how to quickly go from the edit screen back to the screen where you get to view the results. What exactly is it that you don’t understand about the system?
Michael Gray February 14, 2007 at 9:34 am: What I don’t understand is what each little box does, and how to configure it, a walk through NOT WRITTEN IN PROGRAMMING SPEAK would be nice.
Edd February 14, 2007 at 10:46 am: lol I’m a programmer and ask me if I understood Y! Pipes when I opened it?

It lacks of a Intro Tour or something.
Todd Mintz February 14, 2007 at 1:58 pm: Mike, I’m getting an error message when clicking on the “My Pipe Account” link. Would like to see what you’ve done…
Ben Laden February 14, 2007 at 5:32 pm: Like everything else with yahoo it will sit there stagnant for years, like yahoo mail, until google came along with gmail which signaled it’s death blow.