plumber!s toolbox

pubDate and guid in RSS

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:39:00 +0800

When creating a custom feed from e.g. a JSON source, it’s so irritating not to have pubDate or proper guid fields in the output RSS. Creating item.pubDate and item.guid entries won’t work. Here’s how to do it.

pipes.yahoo.com/plumber/dateguid

Relative Time

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 07:03:00 +0800

Here’s a module that converts date/time strings to relative time, e.g. “less than a minute ago”, “about 3 hours ago”, “about 26 days from now”, etc. It handles past and future dates and outputs relative time from minutes to years. The Date Input module is quite lax as to what constitutes a valid date, and everything is converted to UTC — make sure you test it first so there are no surprises.

For a demo, please see pipes.yahoo.com/plumber/reltimedemo. You can see it running below:

This module is for Gari. Hi, bro! :-)

pipes.yahoo.com/plumber/reltime

Field(s) in Regex

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:45:00 +0800

To use a field as part of the replacement value in a Regex, use the following: ${fieldname}. You can use this with a String Builder as well.

pipes.yahoo.com/plumber/fieldinregex

Array to string

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:44:00 +0800

Here’s a neat trick. Did you know that you can use the URL Builder to turn array elements into a slash-delimited string?

pipes.yahoo.com/plumber/a2str

Tumblr Titles with Tags

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:43:00 +0800

Given the Field in Regex and Array To String tricks, here’s a standalone tool that modifes your Tumblr feed such that the tags you assign to a post are appended to the title. You can optionally specify a regex for the tags that you want to exclude.

Check it out!

pipes.yahoo.com/plumber/tttags

Case-insensitive regex

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:08:00 +0800

You can specify “i” in the Regex operator, but what about the Filter operator and String Regex module?

Simple. Just prefix your regex with (?i) — this makes the match case-insensitive for the remainder of the string.

pipes.yahoo.com/plumber/ciregex

Parameter reuse

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 07:39:00 +0800

It may not be immediately obvious, but you can wire the output of various Inputs and Builders as many times as you need.

pipes.yahoo.com/plumber/reuseparam

Counter (for loop)

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:01:00 +0800

A loop that counts from A to B is quite useful for the times when you need to repeat a certain operation X times.

This module is similar to Mauricio Scheffer’s, but uses an internal string for the number source instead of pulling in a CSV file from a remote host. By default, it’s limited to a max of 1000 loops as well, but you can just add more numbers.

To use this, clone it and drag into your editor from “My pipes” into a Loop where you embed your desired action. The counter is accessible as “item.i”. Note that the silly “+ 0” loop is a workaround for a bug in the String Tokenizer, where it tokenizes 0 to an empty string.

Here’s a bash one-liner to make more numbers. Just copy and paste the values into the String Builder.

limit=2000; (for ((i=0;i < $limit; ++i)); do echo -n $i; if [ $i -ne (( $limit-1 )) ]; echo -n , ’ ) > $limit-numbers.csv

pipes.yahoo.com/plumber/counter

Feed switch

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:29:00 +0800

You can use this technique for any problem that requires runtime modification of the pipe output, for instance, when you use a feed with embeddable gadgets.

In this example, you can exclude descriptions (excerpts) by specifying an xd parameter value of 1.

pipes.yahoo.com/plumber/feedswitch