Today I discovered Yahoo Pipes, a way to mix and filter input from the web. This made me pretty excited–for a while, I’ve had as a project in the middle of my TODO list, to find a way to rss posts only by a specific author. In particular, I wanted to have an RSS feed that looked at the tor.com RSS feed, but only kept posts by Liz Gorinsky. I assumed that this would involve writing a little script to go to this specific feed, parse out the entries, and then just display the ones which had Liz as the author: a good hour or so of work to do the parsing, RSS comprehension, and debugging to get it all to work properly.

However, in under ten minutes at Yahoo Pipes, I’d made this, which allows you not just to filter out posts by Liz, but allows anyone to create a new RSS feed to filter Tor’s feed for any author they input. It was all done with a very slick visual interface where I literally dragged and linked together the components without writing a single line of code.

This seems to be just scratching the surface of Yahoo Pipes’ capabilities, too: besides filtering, they’ve got widgets for location extraction, regular expressions, combining multiple feeds…I think this is going to be a pretty powerful tool.