Check out these pipes!

If you're hip to RSS and, in particular, have a lot of feeds coming to your reader, then you might be interested in Yahoo Pipes. This free service allows you to customize RSS feeds however you want, including my new favorite - keyword filtering.

Say you like getting National news from the NY Times to your RSS reader, but you are tired of stories about Anna Nicole Smith. Load up the feed in Pipes, filter the keyword "tart" and you're good to go!

This screenshot shows how I filtered my Lifehacker RSS feed to remove entries relating to Windows Vista, an operating system to avoid at all costs. In the first box I entered the RSS URL, in the second box I chose to block feed items with the word "Vista" in the title. In the output below, you can see the edited feed, with no Windows Vista items!

Updated moldybluefeatures!

Update 5:00pm: I've also added a "label cloud" to the sidebar, so you can see what topics I post on most often and quickly read more of them. As if you'd want to...

I tweaked the sidebar on the blog today, adding a list of "shared items" which come from my Google Reader RSS list. The list of three basically represents the three most share-worthy stories I've read recently and may include things I actually write about.

What is RSS?
For those of you who read multiple blogs or news sites and are thinking "Reader? RSS?" here's a quick tutorial on something you should definitely check out:

To get a grasp of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), think about syndicated newspaper columnists (like Thomas Friedman). He writes for one paper, the New York Times, but is picked up in dozens of papers around the country. RSS is similar. You find a syndicated feed (RSS) and you subscribe to it, basically having the article or story sent to you.

To read these story feeds, you just need to use a "feed aggregator" or "news reader," and there are plenty of free ones to download, add on to your browser, or use on the web. The reader collects all the stories as they are published and posts them (usually in chronological order) for your reading pleasure.

So, on a typical morning you could fire up your RSS reader and read new blog entries from your friends, stories from the NY Times Sports section, and the latest report on crop rotation from Iowa State. Whatever you're reading, it's a great way to have the stuff you really care to read all in one place.

Automated Craigslist searches

I'd like to thank Lifehacker for the tips on becoming a Craigslist power user. I've purchased a few items from Craigslist and gotten some freebies, but sometimes what you want isn't immediately available. And if you have a little time, that's no problem.

What was news to me is that every Craigslist search has an RSS feed. Every time you search for "weber grills" or "beanie babies," a little orange link at the bottom of the results page says "RSS." Copy that to your favorite RSS reader and - voila - real-time updates on the availability of your item.

Neat!