pipefitter’s dream.
Originally uploaded by D.James.

Have you tried Yahoo! Pipes? I played with it briefly when it was launched as everyone talked about it and I was impressed with its fun UI.

Yahoo! Pipes has added more modules since its launch. The latest one is the Fetch Data module which allows you to use arbitrary XML and JSON data in your pipe just like you have previously been able to use RSS and Atom feeds.

I have created a pipe to create a custom RSS feed of my Tumblr quotes from the Tumblr XML using the Fetch Data module.

I don’t know if the feed I created is useful, but I have really enjoyed the Pipes UI (again) and rediscovered how great it is. I am impressed that the pulldown menu of each module gets dynamically updated as per input data. The debugger that shows you the output after every module in your pipe chain made the development easier. I used the Regex module to make the title shorter and concatenate the quote-test and quote-source in the description. There are examples using each module. Try Yahoo! Pipes and get inspired.