While finishing my book, it wasn't possible for me to keep up with all the changes that were happening with the many web applications I track in the book.  One such change came in Yahoo! Pipes:  Pipes Blog » Blog Archive » New "Fetch Page" module and nice web path enhancement….

I have to try the Pipes Fetch Page Module to do some scraping of HTML pages. Also one can start using nicer URLs for various pipes.   For instance,

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?InputURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Fservices%2Fxml%2Frss%2Fnyt%2FInternational.xml&_id=cInT4D7B3BGMoxPNiXrL0A&_render=kml

can now be substituted with

http://pipes.yahoo.com/raymondyee/locationextractor?InputURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Fservices%2Fxml%2Frss%2Fnyt%2FInternational.xml&_render=kml

For your reading pleasure....

Chapter 3: "Tagging and Folksonomies." (2007-08-08)

Chapter 4: "Feeds, RSS and Atom" (2007-08-08)

Chapter 5: "Remixing Weblogs" (2007-08-08)

I currently have an example of how to use Yahoo! Pipes in Chapter 4 of my book. Pipes continues to advance quickly beyond the point I last took a close look. At the start of its life, Pipes dealt only with acepting inputs and creating outputs that are RSS or Atom feeds. Now, it seems to be able handle a broader range of inputs: XML documents in general (I think) but also JSON. When I last looked, the output is still primarily feeds -- though KML is now one of the outputs of Pipes, allowing for the generation of mapping data that can be plotted directly on Google Earth and Google Maps. I'm looking forward to being able to produce a broader range of outputs as well as being able to plug in third party filters and transforms.

For an engaging talk on the subject by the creator of Pipes, see it on Google Video.

I posted today first drafts of 5 more chapters for my book.   Take a look -- I'd love to get some feedback on these drafts.   (Send me email at raymondyee AT mashupguide DOT net.):

Chapter 3: "Tagging and Folksonomies." (2007-05-02 07:58:41)

Chapter 4: "RSS and Atom and syndication; integration with news readers" (2007-04-24 17:52:20)

Chapter 5: "Integration with Weblogs and Wikis" (2007-05-02 08:08:41)

Chapter 8: "Learning AJAX/Javascript widgets and their APIs" (2007-04-06)

Chapter 14: "Social Bookmarking and bibliographic systems" (2007-05-02 08:33:09)

It's very difficult to keep up with the world of public APIs and mashups -- even for someone like me who is writing a book on the topic and teaching a course on the subject! Now that I have a bit more time to work on the topic, I turn now to being more assiduous in my reading of online news sources. My first priority is a consistent read of John Musser's ProgrammableWeb. I already make steady use of its database of APIs and often point others to the Mashup Dashboard when people ask me for concrete examples of mashups. Now I want to keep up with his blog. Today (April 20)'s post concerns Google AJAX Feed API, which is described thus by the Google documentation:

With the AJAX Feed API, you can download any public Atom or RSS feed using only JavaScript, so you can easily mash up feeds with your content and other APIs like the Google Maps API.

Hmmm...I get to a detailed look at Chapter 4 next week on RSS and other feeds. I've written about Yahoo Pipes for remixing RSS. This Google AJAX widget demands a close look too! (Thanks, John, for alerting me to this new development! I also need to subscribe to Google AJAX Search API Blog in my news reader.)