Mash Oop North – Pipes Mashup by Way of an Apology

Following my total melt-down at Mash Oop North earlier today, (sorry, folks:-( here’s a walkthrough of a Yahoo pipe that I had intended to demonstrate properly…

The context is a feed powered mechanism for tracking new articles in academic journals. The starting point is jOPML, a service created by Scott Wilson that allows you to run a keyword search on the titles of journals whose tables of contents are made available as RSS on ticTOCs and a generate an OPML feed containing the RSS feed URLs for those journal TOCS.

So for example, running a search for science history returns:

with the OPML available here: http://jopml.org/feeds.opml?q=science+history

So let the pipework begin…. First construct the URI to the OPML feed:

For each table of contents RSS URI in the OPML file, grab that table of contents listing:

Now filter the titles those current article results using another set of keyword terms:

So there we have it – a 2D search that takes two sets of keywords, one set that pulls out likely suspect journals on a topic, and the second set that filters articles from those journals on a more detailed subject.

The output from the pipe is then available as an RSS feed in its own right, as a Google personal (iGoogle) widget, etc etc.

PS A fully worked tutorial explaining the operation of this pipe can be found at Mashlib Pipes Tutorial: 2D Journal Search