Thanks to everyone who has continued to provide the Pipes team with valuable suggestions. Today, we pushed a number of improvements that we want to tell you more about.

1) You can now use subfields in the Regex and Rename Modules. It’s also possible to refer to an item using dot syntax: ${published.timezone}.

If something in the preview pane is nested three levels deep, foo->bar->baz, you can refer to it as ${foo.bar.baz} in Regex replacements. Here’s an example to get you started.

2) Titles in a Pipe that contain quotes and/or angle brackets no longer get mangled

3) You can now use URLs that have urlencoded characters (like %22) in the Fetch Module.

4) Modules can now contain arbitrary text. In the past, fields that contained values that looked like tags (for example: <something>) were getting unexpectedly escaped or stripped.

5) Certain BBC feeds that were broken now work.

We setup an open crossdomain.xml file at pipes.yahooapis.com. This update allows Flash developers to get the output of a Pipe in JSON or RSS formats.

To access your Pipe from Flash you need to take the following steps:

1. Find the JSON or RSS URL for the Pipe you want to call. After you run a Pipe you can find these links in the “Subscribe” tab. Here’s an example URL for the RSS feed of a Pipe:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=5BiciiOz2xGc28CWpRr.og&query=rss&username=joshua&_render=rss

2. Replace the domain name in the above URL from “yahoo” to “yahooapis”. Here’s an example of the change:
http://pipes.yahooapis.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=5BiciiOz2xGc28CWpRr.og&query=rss&username=joshua&_render=rss

We pushed several new updates to Pipes based on the comments we’ve been receiving at the Pipes Suggestion Board. They include:

* A new Split Module, for creating duplicate copies of feeds.

* Significant bugfixes to both the Filter and Regex Modules, so that pattern matching will now work correctly with Chinese and Russian text, and Unicode in general.

* A significant bugfix to the Translate Module, it should no longer mangle encoding.

* The introduction of a new URL syntax across the site (note: these changes should be backwards compatible for Pipes that users have already subscribed to.)

* The list of sources associated with a Pipe now appears on the run page.

As always, we look forward to hearing what you think!

We’ve setup a del.icio.us account to start sharing Pipes related URLs. You can access it here:
http://del.icio.us/pipes.yahoo.com

In the past few weeks we’ve discovered many great tutorials, videos, creative Pipes and interesting ways Pipes is being used.

We’ll continue to add to the list but if you come across something you think we should add please bookmark it on del.icious along with the tag “for:pipes.yahoo.com”. Thanks for sharing!

Welcome back! We apologize for the unscheduled downtime this evening. For those just tuning in Pipes is still in beta.

This evening we noticed new problems with the Pipes servers. We’ve taken the site offline while we investigate this further. We will be back with an update as soon as possible. Thanks again for your patience!

Our apologies for the unscheduled downtime this evening. As a reminder, todays post was sponsored by the letters “b” “e” “t” and “a”.

This evening we started noticing some problems with the Pipes servers. We’ve taken the site offline while we investigate the problems. We will be back with an update as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!