If you’ve ever wanted to change the contents of an RSS feed, then Yahoo Pipes gives you an easy way to do it.
The problem I am solving is one where I need to update a podcast feed to add the name of the show. On the Lifestyle PodNetwork when we display a list of shows we start with the name of the show, followed by an episode. Some hosts forget or can’t add the name of the show, so this is a way we can do it for them.
So here’s a picture of what I started with (fig 1.1), followed by the result after I used Yahoo Pipes (fig 1.2).
fig. 1.1
fig. 1.2
This is what you do:
Firstly, setup an account in Yahoo Pipes at http://pipes.yahoo.com, and start a new pipe.
Next from the Sources menu select Fetch feed and drag it to the workspace. Once you have done this enter the RSS feed you want to modify
Next from the Operators menu choose Sort. Configure the sort operator by publication date item.pubDate and then descending. This will ensure that the most recent items are on top.
Then choose Regex from the Operators menu. Configure item.title and leave the text field blank. This will append your string of text ahead of any content already in the item title. In the With field, type the text you wish to add. In my case I added “Create Your LifeStory ”
Do remember to add a space to the end of your string so that your new text does not run up directly against the string of text in the item title.
Once you have your feed working the way you want it to, then you can experiment with other great options like Truncate which limits the number of records it returns from your RSS feed in the output.
Your final pipe should look something like fig 1.3
fig 1.3 - Yahoo! Pipes example
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