Filtered Lifehacker RSS feed using Yahoo! Pipes

March 13, 2007 / Filed under: Lifehacker, Pipes, RSS, Yahoo

I really love Lifehacker, except it's often very hard to keep up with the amount of posts each day. If I miss a few days, there is sometimes hundreds of Lifehacker posts to catch up on. This quickly becomes overwhelming.

To make things easier, I decided to create a Yahoo! Pipe for Lifehacker posts.

Using Pipes, I've filtered out any posts with the following phrases in the post title:

  • "Video Demonstration"
  • "Download of the day"
  • "Daily news roundup"
  • "Comment thread roundup"
  • "Weekend project"
  • "TGIF" (This week's best posts)
  • "Retro roundup" (one year ago on Lifehacker)

The above phrases are typically used for posts that I don't really care for. It's not that they aren't valuable to me - it's just easier to filter out the stuff that doesn't immediately pique my interest. Also, these posts often contain links to previous posts I've already read.

By filtering out these excess posts, I can focus only on the true articles on Lifehacker.

Keep in mind - this only works because Lifehacker names their posts consistently.

For example, every Friday they provide a post titled, "TGIF - This week's best posts." The content of this post is just links to previous articles from the week - many of which I've already read, anyway. The point is - the post title is always the same, making it easy for Yahoo! Pipes to filter it out.

I've also limited the results to 15 posts - which is approximately how many are posted each day. So no matter what, I only see the most recent 15 posts. Everything else I don't care for. Just give me what's new.

I've titled the pipe, Lifehacker 15 recent articles. Subscribe to it if you'd like.

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