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| Using Yahoo Pipes to Filter Recent QuickBooks User Forum Posts on Topics of Interest By Richard Torian June 9, 2008 Yahoo Pipes is a system that can be used to “mash-up”, or combine, RSS feeds from several sources so that the feeds travel down one “pipe”. With these feeds traveling down this pipe, one is able to filter for information that might be contained in the feeds. This can be a great tool for selectively “picking” from much information in the feeds coming down the pipe, the information in the feeds that is relevant to one’s needs. The Yahoo Pipes website provides the location where feeds from various sources can be mashed together (fed down one pipe). Then, using additional technology provided by Yahoo Pipes, the information in the feeds can be filtered by inputting the keywords representing the information wanting to be filtered out of the flowing feeds. The above is a very brief overview, hopefully in rather simple, non-technical terminology, of a basic application that can be made of Yahoo Pipes. This article presents an actual Yahoo Pipes creation (Yahoo Pipes Product) to demonstrate the above. The RSS feeds being used are feeds that come from the QuickBooks Users Forum. The Forum is organized by topic, e.g. inventory, accounts receivable, reports, etc. Dozens of topics exist that users can post questions and answers on, selecting the topic that they believe is most appropriate. For each topic, Intuit (the owner of the QuickBooks User Forum website) has set up a separate RSS feed being generated from that topic page. Often, one might find a question and answers on a subject, e.g inventory, in more than one topic area. A question with answers on inventory would seemingly most likely be under the topic “inventory”, but often questions and answers on inventory can also be found under other topics, such as manufacturing, point of sales, agriculture, and many others. With this being the case, one can put Yahoo Pipes (mash-up technology) to good use. Assume one is very interested in accounting for inventory using QuickBooks, and wants to follow problems (questions) and solutions (answers) on inventory, being posted on the QuickBooks User Forum. One can determine each topic area on the QuickBooks User’s Forum likely to have questions posted, related to inventory. Then, for each topic area, one can copy the RSS feed URL, provided at the QuickBooks User Forum site, over to the Yahoo Pipes website, to create a Yahoo Pipes product that will lead to filtering these RSS feeds for “inventory”. Using this self-created Yahoo Pipes product can save a lot of time. Rather than needing to go to each appropriate QuickBooks User Forum topic page, looking for recent posts on inventory, one can much more quickly use the Yahoo Pipes product to periodically filter on “inventory” (or any other keyword of interest) for what has recently been posted on all of the topic pages with RSS feeds added to the Yahoo Pipes product. Click here to see this in action. Enter the keyword in the box next to “Enter you search keywords” and click “Run Pipe”. This will lead to recent posts, across several topic areas, having the word “inventory” in the post. The Yahoo Pipes product described above is currently being used on the Management Accounting Information Center (MAIC)’s content page: Useful QuickBooks Information. You can go to this page by clicking “Links, RSS Feeds, and Ads” on the MAIC’s homepage. Then, click “QuickBooks information”, under “Support Websites” and then under “Accounting Software”. |