OUseful.Info, the blog…

I’ve demonstrated previously a way of using JQuery to pull the JSON (Javascript Object Notion) output of a Yahoo pipe – a Javascript version of an RSS feed, essentially – into a web page (Previewing the Contents of a JSON Feed in Yahoo Pipes), but if the idea of tinkering with JQuery is one step towards coding hell to far, what are the alternatives?

One approach is to grab the RSS output of a pipe and use it as the RSS URL in Feed2js, which will let you customise a review display of the output of the pipe and give you a handy Javascript embed code for the display that you can embed in your own page.

I don’t know why, but I keep forgetting the Yahoo pipes itself offers a couple of widgets – referred to as “badges” – for displaying the output of a pipe in your own web page: Yahoo Pipes Badges how to.

As with the pipe output previews on the “homepage” of a Yahoo Pipe, three sorts of display are possible – a list based display, an image display (which displays a slide show of images identified as such in the feed) and a map badge, which renders markers on an interactive Yahoo map. For the latter, you can also take the KML output of a feed, paste it into the Google Maps search box, and grab an iframe embed code.

Unfortunately, embedding the Javascript snippets used to display the Yahoo Pipes badges in WordPress.com hosted blogs isn’t allowed – so to display pipe fed content in such a blog you need to use the RSS output URL from a pipe in a WordPress RSS sidebar widget.