Political Opinion Avoidance with Yahoo! Pipes
If you are anything like me, you dread the upcoming political season and presidential elections. Not because we don’t value our freedom and right to vote, but because we just get sick and tired of hearing uninformed, biased, and irrational opinions everywhere we turn.
There’s nothing wrong with expressing your opinion either, I’ll spend plenty of time this year reading about the presidential candidates, their views, and I’ll try to make the best informed decision that I can before I vote in November. That said, the one place that I don’t want to get my information from is the blogs that I read to get information for something else. In my case, I don’t want to read about politics in the blogs that I subscribe to read about design. If only we could filter out the annoying political commentary…
Yahoo! Pipes to the Rescue
Yahoo! Pipes provides a simple solution. Simply run culprit RSS feeds through a Yahoo Pipes which filters out posts riddled with political nonsense, and you’ll never be irritated again.
For example, one of my favorite design blogs is Speak Up , but after two posts in one week about the presidential elections, I’ve had enough. Follow along to see how the problem is remedied.
The Yahoo Pipes interface is very easy to use. It reminds me of a combination of Apple’s Automator and Omni Graffle.
First, I create a Yahoo! pipe that receives a site url, filters it, and outputs a new RSS feed (you can start with my Political Opinion Avoider pipe). I’ve created a filter that includes the stuff that I don’t want to hear about (Presidential, Election, Obama, Hillary, Edwards, McCain, Romney, Huckabee, Guliani, etc…)
Once a pipe is created, you can create a new RSS feed for any of the sites that you subscribe to.
Then, you simply grab the new feed and replace the existing feed URL in your RSS reader of choice (I prefer Bloglines)
If you have several Blogs that you’d like to filter, you might consider cloning the pipe, and combining all the feeds into one feed, or you can take the follwing url, and prefix your existing feed’s url in your RSS reader.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=LH4BvSy_3BGq6aYOG8evXg&_render=rss&feed=
There you go—political opinion free reading.
Final Thoughts
Yahoo! Pipes puts some powerful tools into your hands, and surely has much more useful applications than what I was able to create here in a few minutes.
I am not advocating that you avoid the political process entirely, I’m just giving you some tools that will help you control the information that you do get, and a way to avoid the constant irritation that is sure to plague nearly everything good this year at least once. Find a good source from which to make your decisions and don’t let uninformed, biased, and irrational opinions ruin your year.
For the first time in my life I understand how Yahoo Pipes works—it came as something of an epiphany during your fifth paragraph. Thank you.
lol my filter texts are exactly same as yours :D
(Presidential, Election, Obama, Hillary, Edwards, McCain, Romney, Huckabee, Guliani, etc…)
And the maches are Presidential, Election, Obama, Hillary, McCain, Huckabee