Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes is, as the site says, “a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” It uses the idea from Unix of “piping” a series of commands together in a sequence — passing the results from one command to use as the input for the next — but does so using an intuitive graphical user interface. I’ve used Pipes to reformat the feed and remove a few unnecessary branding elements from Scopus. My main objectives were to make the description look more like a citation (albeit incomplete) and to edit the links to Scopus so that they send the user through EZproxy for off-campus access.

The links are no longer IP address dependent, but they are specific to the institution hosting EZproxy. The first link below goes to the Pipes page for the feed I created where I can preview the results of my changes. The second link is to the feed itself.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=gket7SkL3RGuUHXSy6ky6g

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=gket7SkL3RGuUHXSy6ky6g&_render=rss

Display Using Pipes Badge

Pipes has something called a “badge” which lets you embed your feed into a webpage using javascript. It is just a matter of copying the script into your own webpage. The display presents items as a striped list. Titles are linked to the proxied url for the corresponding complete record in Scopus and the item description below that is presented in the citation-like format we applied to it in Pipes.

However, I have to say that my experience with Pipes is that they can be a little fragile in display mode and not all RSS feed readers do a good job with them. Plus, the url that Pipes uses is no improvement over the one generated directly by Scopus.