Eight Great, Simple Ways to Hack the Web

Create an RSS Feed

Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is a great way to get your Web content read. Because nearly all browsers, e-mail programs, Web portals, and search engines support RSS, you can push your site's offerings to readers who are interested in the subjects you cover. An RSS feed is a text file that lists your site's title and individual articles, along with the URLs. For simple sites, you could create this file by hand using a text editor and the RSS 2.0 specification. The RSS Board's Web site provides an RSS playground where you can plug in feed values and variables to test your feed.

However, it's much easier to use one of the many automatic RSS feed generators that "scrape" your site's HTML tags for likely feed items and generate an XML file. Of the dozens of such services (most of which are free), start with FeedYes, which not only scrapes sites for feed content automatically but also helps you construct feeds manually. Once your feed is done, check it for errors at Feed Validator or use the RSS Board's validator. When it's ready, submit it for syndication with FeedBurner's free service. And while you're at the FeedBurner site, consider letting the Google-owned service monetize your feed via Google's AdSense program.

Filter Feeds Through Yahoo's Pipes

News feeds help you stay current, but they're time-consuming to read. If you're looking for a needle in the RSS haystack, Yahoo's powerful and free Pipes construction set enables you to pour feeds through dozens of prefabricated logic modules that search, modify, or analyze them and then pump the result through other modules and services to output the fine-tuned result. Popular pipes cough up the YouTube videos of the top ten songs on iTunes, deliver Flickr photos related to stories in the New York Times, and display the favorite photos of your Flickr contacts.

Building your own feed is a drag-and-drop affair. Click the Documentation link on the home page to reach a tutorial, online help, and sample pipes that show you how to mix and match modules.

To build a pipe, use your Yahoo ID to sign in at the Pipes home page, and click Create a pipe to open the Pipes editor. Select a module from the 'User inputs' or 'Sources' categories (such as Fetch Feed to add an RSS feed) on the left side of the editing screen, and drag it onto your page. Next, pick a module from 'Operators', 'String', or another data-manipulation category and drag it onto the page. Enter the necessary filtering information. Next, drag from the "port" on the bottom of the box to connect the output of the first module to the input of the second, and the output of the second to the input of the Pipe Output module at the bottom of the page.

When you're done, click Save, and then Run Pipe to use your finished pipe. Finally, click Publish to share your pipe with the world. Depending on which modules you connected, your pipe might actually do something useful, such as find feeds on an arcane subject, though fine-tuning the output can be a lengthy process. By connecting several PCWorld.com news feeds to the 'For Each: Replace' module (which contains the Flickr source module), I built a pipe that illustrates what many of the products reported on look like, along with some occasionally unexpected results. I even managed to filter out duplicate images by introducing the 'Unique' module. The really ingenious pipes are much more complex, however.