Web-Feeds .. A Pre-requisite towards understanding Yahoo Pipes

Many must have been seeing news snippets regarding Yahoo-pipes in the blogs that you pass by.. more adventurous souls would have googled and would have tried to gather information regarding this and try to figure out what this hype is all about..
Here is a Pictorial represntation of how effectively you can use yahoo pipes in your blog

  1. Definition of Web-Feed
    Web feed is a Document that contains information regarding the content of the respective URL
  2. What is the purpose of web-feed?
    With the number of websites/ blogs growing everyday.. its practically impossible to visit each one of them just to check if there is an update on your favourite story..so what the end-user (reader of the website) does is..He subscribes to the feed of the particular website/ blog
  3. Real-Life Example of using Web-Feeds
    Most of us use our post feeds and comment feeds to display our RecentPosts(5) and RecentComments(5) in our sidebar.. For those who don’t know..
    POST FEED – http://YOUR_BLOG_NAME.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
    CONTENT FEED – http://YOUR_BLOG_NAME.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?alt=rss
  4. How does Subscribing help me?
    If there is an update.. you get an alert in your mailbox–If there is no update.. then you can rest in peace..and need not worry about missing the latest news
  5. Web-feed…an XML document
    Web Feed as I said earlier are XML-documents. So they are developed to be read by machines (machine-readable) than by humans..(humanly-readable)By doing this.. when the feed is directly viewed in the browser ..Its only natural that you are not able to make head-or-tail out of it
  6. How is Web-feed being read
    This is done with the help of applications like FeedBurner, FeedReader, GoogleReader etc…
    ie..once you subscribe to a feed ( or give the URL).. these applications ( machine-reads) reads the XML document( web-feed) and displays them in a more readable format (HTML document) in the browser
  7. Feed Aggregation
    Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation.
  8. Yahoo Pipes – A Feed Aggregator
    Yahoo Pipes is a Web-Application by Yahoo… That allows the users to create their own aggregation of feeds without any sort of coding. Yahoo Pipes uses a Graphical-User-Interface allowing users to Drag-Drop controls

Source:- Wikipedia

2 Replies to “Web-Feeds .. A Pre-requisite towards understanding Yahoo Pipes”

  1. Thanks so much, Deepa. That was such a useful post. I have put your site in my Favorites list and am looking forward to more such posts.

    Raju

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