There’s lots of cool content on the web that doesn’t have RSS feeds (or good RSS feeds). Thankfully, synthesizing feeds for most of them is pretty easy (Here’s an example in Python, from back when the Day by Day comic had lousy feeds that forced one to click to see the comic).

Now Yahoo Pipes makes it even simpler, at least for some feeds. The BBC’s Magazine publishes a blog with a great “10 Things We Didn’t Know Last Week” feature, but it doesn’t have its own feed! Thanks to Pipes, I was easily able to come up with a feed only for 10 things. Pipes won’t replace Perl anytime soon, but anything that makes it easier for people to remix data is great to find (and oh, their development environment is very cool indeed).

Update: As Aaron points out below, 10 Things does have its own feed, which I would have discovered if I had bothered to scroll down the page instead of clicking the Subscribe icon in my browser’s status bar (perhaps there’s a usability lesson in there somewhere?). Oh well, it was still a great way to get my feet wet with Pipes.

Update 2: It turns out the BBC 10 Things feed isn’t full-text but my Pipes output is, because the feed it’s based on happens to be full-text. So it turns out Pipes is useful after all. Hooray for remixing!

Subscribe to the full-text 10 Things feed.