So I recently found myself using Yahoo! Pipes.  I wanted to aggregate all the RSS feeds from local newspapers, filter the articles for those that mentioned the Company (which is what I will henceforth call the place at which I hold a steady job), and consume it in the Company’s new web app I’m working on.  I’d heard of Pipes a few years back, but I never had the reason to use it.  It’s a great tool and dead simple to use.  We could probably use it to replace the (what I’m sure is expensive) news aggregator service that culls industry news and articles that mention the Company from publications across the country.  Well, maybe eventually.

Anyway, creating the pipe was easy and using the interface was actually quite fun.  I’m pulling from almost 40 different feeds, filtering for mentions of the Company’s name in both the title, and the articles themselves, and now have one single feed I can now use.  On the web app end I’m using the ever-powerful and omnipotent jQuery to consume the feed in the JSON format.  Now, I’m not going to go in-depth in how this is accomplished, but rather I want to throw out this “gotcha” moment I experienced and hopefully, help at least one of the two people who will ever see this post avoid my mistake.

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