Until now JSON output has been the only way to obtain all the data flowing through a Pipe. Starting today we’ve added a second way of getting all the data - serialized PHP Pipe output.

To get this, go to your Pipe -> More options -> Get as PHP. Right click the “Get as PHP” link to copy link location (or copy shortcut if using IE).

After obtaining the link location, you can do something as simple as this to get Pipe output data as an array into your PHP script.

// Pipes Request
$req = 'http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=ZKJobpaj3BGZOew9G8evXg&_render=php‘;
// Make the request
$phpserialized = file_get_contents($req);
// Parse the serialized response
$phparray = unserialize($phpserialized);

To view the array in your web browser, use this piece of PHP code to help visualize the array.

print_r($phparray);

To view a code sample on how to do a request go here. To read more about serialized PHP at Yahoo!, go here.

It’s then up to you on how you want to display or use the Pipe data. The possibilities are endless.

Did you ever want an easy way of putting Pipes output onto your website or blog?

Introducing - Pipes badges!

We currently have three types of badges - map, image and list. Map badges are available if there is geocoded data in the feed. Image badges are available if there are media images in the feed. List badges will always be present if there is valid data.

Read more about how to configure them here.

You’ll notice that on the Pipe info pages there is a new link called “Get as a Badge.”

Click on the “Get as a Badge” link and a wizard will guide you on adding it to certain destinations like your WordPress blog, iGoogle page or any web site (that supports Javascript).

For those of you that are more technically inclined, we are using a script node replacement technique that uses JSON embedded configuration (This is based on Kent Brewsters “Case Harded Javascript”).

It’s Pipes first birthday and we’ve grown so much!

We’d like to thank our users and developers for making Pipes so successful. It really makes us enjoy getting up in the morning and coming to work.

Since our launch (way back in 07), we have been focused on listening to what you want and prioritizing those features in each release. This has meant adding over 20 new modules, redesigning our site to make Pipes easier to find and use, and numerous backend enhancements. As always, please give us your suggestions here.

It’s amazing to see the variety of Pipes that people have been building using the simple visual editor we provide. These range from translating text from one language to another, to searching for the best apartments near a park, to monitoring hundreds of RSS feeds for certain topics.

In the past year we’ve adding some cool features such as, Flash support (tutorial link), iPhone support (wired buzz), Private Field support (external tutorial link) and Fetch Page module (external tutorial link) just to name a few.

We also have had some awesome tutorials created by our amazing users. Here are some recent articles:

• A brief reintroduction to Yahoo! Pipes - Part 1 of 5
• Yahoo Pipes - A case study of using the Regex Module

Pipes Books! Download these and print them out for your bleary eyes:

• Working with Yahoo! Pipes, No Programming Required
• O’Reilly Short Cuts - Yahoo! Pipes

We have some new cool features coming in the near future - find out about them on this blog!

In the mean time, check out these recent Pipes we’ve made. yahoo.search.image - by Jonathan (our fearless co-founder of Pipes) - shows how a Pipe can be used to wrap REST-style APIs and Feed Item Search that looks at the search results of any query and finds RSS items in those results. craigslist / zillow mashup - created by Paul (gui gluer) - cross references Zillow and craigslist to find out what Zillow thinks the estimated price should be in craigslist and yahoo buzz image search shows 5 images associated with each Yahoo! buzz item.

We were delighted to hear about the first ever pipesCamp that was recently held in Chennai, India.

The event had approximately 50 hackers and hobbyists attending. The event not only allowed experienced users to share new ideas, techniques and pipes - but also provided a community for new users to tap into the power of Yahoo! Pipes.

The agenda of pipesCamp covered the history and evolution of Pipes, the usage of Pipes from a blogger’s and developer’s perspective, experiments with Pipes, workshops / tutorials and feature request discussions. There was also a running contest for “Best Pipe” during this camp with prizes announced at the end of the day. In the afternoon a “hackday” event was held where people formed into groups and created a pipe.

Here are some of the pipes that were popular from the hack event:

• Pipe which can map a bus route in Chennai, India
• http://pipes.yahoo.com/siddhi/mtcmashup

• Ego Search using pipes
• http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=ff3f0342dc7d98890f78cc78bb642e83

Overall the pipesCamp was a success! We hope to see more pipesCamps in the future and congratulate the organizers Prabhu & Bhasker for putting it all together.

More links from the event:

• http://pipescamp.pbwiki.com/
• http://prabhu.wordpress.com/2007/12/24/my-presentation-on-pipescamp-2007/
• http://blog.hover.in/2007/12/17/see-you-the-first-yahoo-pipes-unconference/
• http://static.slideshare.net/bosky101/end-user-programming-yahoo-pipes/
• http://coolsrini.blogspot.com/2007/12/my-visit-to-pipescamp.html

This week we have two updates to our site: A new module to fetch a pages source and a small fix for easy web paths when running a Pipe.

This weeks release incorporates a new module named “Fetch Page”. The new module will fetch the source of a given web site as a string. This data can then be converted into a RSS feed or merged with other data in your Pipe using the Regex module. The module is located under the “Sources” menu in the editor.

The module can fetch an entire page or you can specify a “starting” and “ending” point. We also offer support for specifying a delimiter to allow you to easily separate the text into strings.

Our team as also created a few examples:
1) Fetch Page Example #1 is our first example. The goal of this Pipe is to extract train schedules from a local train scheduled provided in the San Francisco Bay Area.
2) Fetch Page Example #2 is a simple example that utilizes the first example as a sub-Pipe to obtain addition train stops.

Additional information about this new module along with its limitations can be found in the documentation modules/sources section.

Our second change to the site this week is a minor fix/enhancement to allow for easy web paths of all Pipe.runs page. This will allow you to use the easy paths you created for your Pipes. For example, the Pipe above “Fetch Page Example #1″ would look like the following below (please note the “?” instead of the “&”):

Original name:
“http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=1qoLq6ai3BGv06982R2EvQ&_render=rss&station=Palo+Alto”

Easy web address name:
“http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes_team/fetch_page_example?_render=rss&station=Palo+Alto”

Four nice changes to Pipes this week.

First, ever wanted to share your Pipe but not your username, password or application ID? Now you can! Pipes now supports “private” fields in two new modules, the private input module and the private string module. Private fields are not visible to anyone but the Pipe creator, and are not copied if the Pipe is cloned. If a Pipe user doesn’t provide a value for a private input field, then any “default” value provided by the Pipe creator continues to be used - so your Pipes will run for anyone but only you can see the private values.

Secondly, in addition to the new private modules we’ve added a “source” view for HTML formatted data in the editor’s debugger. So now those filters and regexes get a lot easier to write when you can easily browse the source directly:

Thirdly, we’ve enabled direct editing for the field selection drop down controls in the editor. This doesn’t sounds like a big deal until you realize you can now add array offsets to dig down into sub-arrays in the data, in any module (not just regex), or work on fields that aren’t currently flowing through the Pipe. For example, want to get at the first link in your raw ATOM feed? Rather than referring to the field as item.link.href, just type item.link.0.href

Finally, the Google feed issues we started experiencing last week should now be thing of the past. No more captchas. Yay!

This week we’ve got three more updates to our site: Give you and your Pipes easy to read URLs; RSS and JSON output from most pages; and quick links to various social bookmarking sites.

First, are you fed up with those impossible to remember Pipe URLs? We certainly were, so now we’ve implemented a way for you to create nice human readable (and memorable!) URLs for your Pipe page, and all of your Pipes. It’s as simple as two clicks for yourself - find the web path URL at the top of your “My Pipes” page, click “edit”, choose a nice name for yourself, and hit “Save”. Done!

Once you’ve got a nice name, its time to move on to your Pipes. Again, it’s as easy as two clicks. Go to your Pipe’s page, press “edit” next to the web path shown just above the actions, type in the nice name for the Pipe, and press “Save”.

Secondly, wherever you can find a list of Pipes on our site, such as our search pages or anyones “My Pipes” page, you can now get that same list as JSON or RSS. So now you can keep up to date with Pipes being created by other great developers, or mash them up in Pipes!

Finally, once you find a Pipe you find interesting, why not share it with others outside of your fellow developers? Just to left of each Pipe’s run page you can find quick links to add the Pipe into various social bookmarking sites.

The Pipes team spent a hectic 24 hours as part of the recent internal Y! hack day (video coming soon) creating an iPhone interface for Pipes. We thought it was so useful we wanted to get it out as soon as possible. Now everyone can access their mash-ups while mobile by going to iphone.pipes.yahoo.com. In addition to running any of your pipes and getting the output in a suitably styled interface, one of the coolest parts of our hack was integrating Pipes with the built-in iPhone mapping application. You can put any of your geo Pipe results on the iPhone just by pressing the “Map” button:

So you can display results from Y! local, as well as answering the question posed by one of our more “urgent” Pipes: the restroom locator. Some other featured pipes that work well while mobile include Live Traffic Results (what exactly is causing that snarl up), and Price watcher - for those of us standing in Frys to work out if that really is a good deal…

We suggest tagging your pipes with “iphoneapp” so we can find and feature the best mobile mashups in the future.

We’ve added far more advanced searching, querying, and ranking capabilities to Pipes. Now you can find the types of Pipes that interest you by refining your search on a number of criteria, including the types of output they produce, what tags they have, what data sources they are mashing up, and in any combination! Pipes are also now ranked and sorted in a new way, allowing more “interesting” Pipes to appear earlier in each search.

Simply start searching in the usual way (type some text into the search box or hit “Browse”) and then you’ll get a list of attribute values down the left hand side of the page that are common to one or more of the search results. These values show you how many of the items in your search contain a particular tag, or access a certain data source, or output a given type of data and so on. Clicking on a particular value (e.g. the tag) will re-search and show only those items in your original search that also have that value. You can keep refining your search by adding more and more attribute values until you find the right Pipes. Refined too much? No problem, just go to the “Current Search” box and click on the “x” next to that value to stop restricting the results that way.

When there are more than 10 values for an attribute they become hidden. Press “More +” to the right of the attribute name (e.g. Tag, or Source) to show them all.

While every release of Pipes fixes many bugs, we don’t often talk about them. However the latest Pipes update addresses one of the biggest problems reported on the message boards and now Pipes supports a wider diversity language encodings and character sets found in many feeds. We still have a few remaining types to nail down but many more feeds should now work well.

Another frequently requested enhancement finally arrives on the Regex module, now our power users (you know who you are) can make use of the “m” “i” “g” and “s” flags.

We’ve also enabled run counting - yes, finally they’re back! We’ve re-counted all those hanging chads, errr, runs, and updated the statistics on each Pipe. Take a look at your Pipes and see how popular they have been.

Fed up with that avatar? You can now use any picture or yourself so other developers can see how pretty you really are. You can change your picture without even leaving your Pipes page: