A pipe takes input from different sources, mixes them together based on criteria you specify, then outputs the results as a single RSS feed. In this example, I created a pipe named “YouTunes” which links to YouTube videos of the top 10 songs on iTunes. Designing it was simple:
- First I dropped a fetch source module onto the canvas, and told it to use the iTunes Top 10 Songs feed as the source.
- Next I added a for each: replace operator module, which takes an input feed and replaces it with output from another feed. In this example, I used the iTunes feed as the input and a Yahoo! search feed as the output.
- I instructed the Yahoo! feed to search for the song name from the iTunes feed (itms:song), then restricted the search to http://www.youtube.com/
- The final step was attaching the “for each” module to the pipe output.
It’s not perfect – it needs additional filtering to weed out irrelevant videos – but I wanted to keep it simple for this example. If you’d like to check out the actual “YouTunes” pipe, you can find it here (or just subscribe to its RSS feed).
PS: Here’s how the RSS feed for this pipe looks in FeedDemon (it would look a lot better if I could figure out how to insert Media RSS thumbnails into the feed).
