«Pipeline Perspective» © Michael KelleyRecently, SpiKe of Organize IT sounded a bit worried, asking: Simplifying Our Lives: Is It A Lost Cause? Looking at RSS feeds, he said:

imagine that your job requires you to be knowledgeable on a subject, are we not potentially skipping useful information and therefore losing out to those who are able to take in dozens of feeds?
(SpiKe)

Today, in my mini series on protecting your inbox, I'll present more techniques how to deal with RSS feed overload. They are based on having your RSS feeds processed, that is: feed items get scrutinized and (sometimes) filtered out, to improve your reading experience.

The tool I'll use is Yahoo Pipes, a graphical editor that allows you to have any news item grabbed from your feeds, checked and even modified, if you wish. Yahoo Pipes looks a bit techy at first, but relax: I'm providing ready-to-use filters that you may use out of the box and even clone and manipulate, too.

I suggest you get a bit familiar with Yahoo Pipes by watching an excellent intro video first. It's really fun and you'll understand within minutes how you can build your own pipes.

Simple Example: filter unwanted postings

I guess many of my readers are subscribed to David Allen's GTD forum newsfeed at http://www.davidco.com/forum/rss.php. If you aren't a member of David's GTD Connect service, you can't read the postings that have a «Members Only:» prefix: following those links just gets you to nag screen.

Enter Yahoo Pipes. Using the most simple filtering of the title by keywords, by dragging and dropping we can build a simple pipe that:

1. Retrieves the original feed, http://www.davidco.com/forum/rss.php
2. Filters out all items that match a certain criteria, in our case: «Members Only:» as part of the posting title
3. Pumps out the scrubbed feed, ready for subscription.

Within the Yahoo's graphical pipe editor, this looks quite trivial:

Filtering "Members Only" items from GTD forums feed

If you don't want to build this pipe on your own, you can find it published at Yahoo Pipes. Just subscribe to the Inofficial, Nonmembers 'The David Allen Company' Feed (RSS link) or visit the Yahoo page for this pipe where you can find links to add this feed to your preferred RSS reader, or to clone and modify it.

This style of filtering is useful for cleaning your favorite feeds from

• repetitive, useless stuff - postings like «...of the week», «One year ago on...», «Best posts in ...» etc.
• news about technologies that are irrelevant to you, e.g. postings about Outlook, Blackberry, Mac OS X, Facebook, Moleskine, etc.
• annoying parts of a mixed RSS feed, like postings of an author who doesn't contribute much of value, opposed to others contributing to the same feed

Also simple: A news is a news is a news, blocked

When you use feed aggregators, search engines or other services that compile an RSS feed for you, you may be familiar with this: the services all find the same postings, over and over again.

Here's an example of what you can do with your del.icio.us subscriptions feed. The major problem with del.icio.us subscription feeds is that they deliver the same links over and over again, because the very same good articles and websites get bookmarked by hundreds of people, and your feed consists of the bookmarks of others. Again using another simple filtering of the links compiled by del.icio.us, we can build a pipe that:

1. Retrieves the original feed, http://del.icio.us/rss/subscriptions/Evomend_EN
2. Filters out all items that contain the same link as another, earlier item
3. Pumps out the scrubbed feed, ready for subscription.

Within the Yahoo's graphical pipe editor, this also looks quite trivial:

Filtering duplicate links from my del.icio.us subscription feed

Again, if you don't want to build this pipe on your own, you can find it published at Yahoo Pipes. Just visit the Yahoo page for this pipe where you can find links to add this feed to your preferred RSS reader, or to clone and modify it.

Caveat

While using Yahoo Pipes is fun, there are a few downsides:

• It is possible to mix a lot of RSS feeds into one, but the resulting feed becomes slow.
  For some online feed readers, like Google Reader, the resulting fetch times can sometimes become so big that your reader thinks there was a problem. As a result, you don't see new feed items or can't even subscribe to your mixed feed because the reader tells you it wasn't «valid».
• It is not possible to process website content easily.
  Forget about retrieving e.g. the articles your del.icio.us subscriptions link to and creating a feed having article teasers.
• You can spend a lot of time fiddling with pipes.
  It's a perfect example of how to become what David Allen calls an «organization groupie». Just browse the pipes repository to see whether somebody else has done what you need, but don't spend too much time trying.

Want more?

There are more postings in this mini-series.