Like many libraries MPOW has a page that lists new books. It also has an RSS feed, because we have a number of branch libraries the new books feed is divided into one feed for each branch. Recently it was requested to break up the feed for the Barr Smith Library into separate feeds for each Dewey Decimal Classification group.
Rather than write something by hand to produce the separate feeds I decided to use the relatively new Yahoo! Pipes website, or should that be service? Using the website and its great graphic interface I was able to create a pipe that extracts items related to a specific Dewey Decimal Classification.
You can see the pipe and how simple it is here. By providing the pipe with the URL of the main Barr Smith Library feed, and a small regular expression I can split the feed into the different Dewey Decimal Classification groups.
The use of Yahoo Pipes for something this simply seems, at first glance, to be a bit of overkill. However there are a few things that it does let me do:
- Create a solution to the problem that can be maintained by more people than just a programmer
- Create a solution in less time than it would have taken to write something
- Introduce the concept of Yahoo Pipes to staff here at the Library
- Explore a new technology
It will be interesting to see how this solution is adopted and if other projects can also be applied to a solution like this.
May 18, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Cool, thank you very much.