I’ve never had as peaceful a work life as back when I used yahoo pipes to organize all the RSS feeds from GitHub and Jira and others into a unified view of what’s happening in all my projects.
It broke due to a fluke because a network engineer decided to try to implement a software based firewall that blocked rss files. This was such a weird error but the engineer didn’t know what rss or curl was if that tells you something. I changed jobs before fixing it and by the time I cared about such things again pipes was gone.
I don't want to spam the project, but since you mention Pipes like that: I tried to bring it back with https://www.pipes.digital/. Can't do everything the original could and some things it just does differently, but merging RSS feeds and filtering them is exactly the main thing I use it for myself.
Hey, thanks :) The project's web application is currently not separated enough into backend/frontend to forge a CLI tool from that backend. There is an export function, but it's meant as a data export for all the pipes (to not hold data hostage), not per canvas, and to my knowledge no one so far has tried to work with the JSON representation the site exports.
However, you can fork pipes in the site UI and then edit them like that. And if a team would share an account to manage a set of Pipes together there is nothing that would prevent that.
The sort of thing I was thinking about was something similar to how post production workflows are setup in film vfx.
You have teams of artists working on 2d and 3d software packages locally. They then save their project, which produces a file that can be rendered on the render farm.
In this rss news equivalent, teams could mash together RSS feeds. Then send their local project export to a backend infrastructure, that would do something with the export, maybe generate a static site, or something more complex .
I mean, RSS fits well to prepare data to go somewhere. Just the offline part you probably do not need. Create your pipe, share the account, or let the other developer fork the pipe. The tool that in the end consumes the feed can just work with the online feed directly from Pipes - those tools expect an url anyway.
God, Yahoo Pipes is a blast from the past. Yahoo did so many things that were new and interesting, but never seemed to be able to bring them altogether into a cohesive product.
Sometimes I think of them as Xerox Parc as they obviously had some smart people sort of tooting around on neat stuff, not worrying about money.
They made so much money, until they didn’t. It’s interesting how these large organizations are able to sort of be patrons of certain activities. Other companies may have spent the surplus on hookers and coke, yahoo let engineers build stuff.
I remember I discovered a page of just amazing project after amazing they released with most recently abandoned and the rest following shortly thereafter.
I don't think any of it was so groundbreaking it would be useful today but there were a number of wheels that would end up being reinvented between then and now.
I never experienced Yahoo Pipes however, I looked at some videos on YouTube and it appears to be similar to Node-Red. It may not be as intuitive but it looks like it may provide a similar experience.
It broke due to a fluke because a network engineer decided to try to implement a software based firewall that blocked rss files. This was such a weird error but the engineer didn’t know what rss or curl was if that tells you something. I changed jobs before fixing it and by the time I cared about such things again pipes was gone.