Yahoo Pipes and Reading Plans


Congratulations to the team behind Yahoo Pipes. As I've said to a lot of people recently, I still think Yahoo is a very exciting company to watch.

One thing I'd like to see possible with Pipes, which I couldn't work out how to do in the 10 minutes I played with it, is reading plans of the sort I described back in a post in 2004.

I've thought about reading plans like this for the Poincare Project. Basically, each reader gets a feed specific to their start date which, starting from the beginning, just adds a new item at some set interval, either daily or weekly.

Recently it occurred to me that this would also work for things like running plans as well (the "5K in 5 weeks" sort of thing).

So the pipe would take as an input a feed, a start date and an interval and introduce the nth oldest item in the feed on day = start date + (n -1) * interval. The input feed would have to be a complete feed, not a sliding window.

But I couldn't see quite how to do this in Pipes as it currently stands.

Of course, one could whip up a quick website that did the same thing too. Hmm, maybe someone already offers this service.

The original post had 1 comment I'm in the process of migrating over.