In the middle of some recent web-based wanderlust, I found myself toying around with Yahoo Pipes, the aggregate web feed builder. Released earlier this year and still in beta, Pipes’ slick Javascript-based GUI lets you drag-and-drop feed sources, user inputs, and operators (like sort, filter, search and replace), and pipe them out to a single output – a consumable web feed. In case it’s not obvious, Pipes is inspired by Unix-style pipelines.

My first creation is a “Pipe” titled FreshFriends. It’s an aggregated feed of FreshBooks employees’ personal blogs. This took me about 30 minutes to create, most of which was spent tracking down everyone’s feed URLs.

Afterwards, I built a classifieds search feed that aggregates local Craigslist and Kijiji listings. I happen to be on the lookout for a used Settlers of Catan board game (don’t ask), so I created this feed to receive new listings directly in my feed reader. The Pipe is generalized so that you can create your own customized feed by changing the supplied search params, including minimum and maximum prices, and location.

Aside from my own creations, there’s also some really cool stuff in the public Pipe browser. I’ve subscribed to one that cleans up Penny Arcade comic feeds to include only comic entries, and scrape the comic image directly into the feed (normally you have to click an embedded link to view the image). No more senseless and artist-supporting ad views!

Long story short, Yahoo Pipes is a nifty – and useful – tool. It makes a lot of mundane scripting tasks fun, and combined with handy source cloning tools, easily shareable too.