There are a bunch of updates to the Pipes Editor to tell you about including three new modules and many new and improved features.

Introducing the new Modules:

• The Location Module creates a location object from a string value and understands most common address formats including zipcodes and many major airport codes. Click on any of the previous links to see examples.
• The Date Builder Module can create a date object from a string value. It understands most common date formats as well as relative date formats such as yesterday and 2 days ago. Here’s an example Pipe that uses the Date Builder module to filter items in a feed by a specific date.
• We added a Simple Math Module that performs basic arithmetic, such as addition and subtraction. Here’s an example of the Simple Math module in action.

Here’s a list of the additional changes:

• We added a new status message area at the top of the Editor.
• Modules that contain date selection fields now include a date picker. We integrated the Yahoo! UI Calendar component.
  
• There’s a new look to the field selectors and drop downs.
  
• Most browsers should be faster when drawing lines.
• Finally, for users running Safari we’ve squashed a bug that made it difficult to connect inner terminal fields within modules.

When we launched Pipes one of our featured examples let you combine multiple feeds on upcoming.org. A couple of weeks ago upcoming.org announced that they’re using this Pipe to power the same feature natively on their site!

To access to it, click on the link to your upcoming.org username and then click on the link you see below labeled ‘All My Stuff in RSS.’

For those of you that aren’t familiar with upcoming.org, it’s a great social events site that offers feeds for things like your subscribed events, your friends’ events, recent activity related to you and your friends, and general news happening on the upcoming.org site.

The Pipe we created aggregates all of those items into a single feed so that you can get all your upcoming.org goodness in one place.

We’ve always felt that, in addition to being a great tool for personal use, Pipes is a great way to quickly and easily enable more functionality in a web application.

We’re glad to see that the team at upcoming.org agree!

The Pipes team pushed an update that introduces some basic error reporting in the Pipes Editor. Full error reporting is on the way. In the meantime we wanted to get something out quickly.

Error messages that are returned by a module are displayed in the Debugger. For example, the Fetch Feed Module now reports HTTP error codes so it’s possible to tell if a URL is failing to parse, etc.

Here’s how the Fetch Feed Module would return an error to a URL that’s not a valid feed:

We’ve introduced a new Fetch Data Module which allows you to use arbitrary XML and JSON data in your pipe just like you have previously been able to use RSS and Atom feeds.

With the introduction of this new module we’ve renamed the Fetch module to Fetch Feed.

To get you started here are a few examples demonstrating how you can use the Fetch Data Module:

• Create a custom RSS feed using the Yahoo! Shopping API and a combination of the Fetch Data and Rename Modules. Run the Pipe then see how the Pipe was built.
• Similarly, using the YouTube API you can turn your favorite tags into an RSS feed. Run the Pipe then see how the Pipe was built.
• Convert an OPML file into an RSS feed. Run the Pipe then see how the Pipe was built.
• Convert the JSON output from Metacarta into a RSS feed. Run the Pipe then see how the Pipe was built.