At last after long time I have something to write about..

I see that some people still use the same old method to download: “Go to the site everyday and check if there’s new updates available”.

Some other people are cleverer, they use Web Feed. Web browsers nowadays usually have intergrated Web Feed Reader. So you only need to use browser to read Web Feed.

If you already know what is Web Feed and how to subscribe to it, you can directly go to here.

What is Web Feed?
Web Feed provides you with information without the need of going to the sites. Some Web Feed readers let you to read Web Feed directly (ex: Google Reader), some just provide links to the original content link provided by the Web Feed (ex: Firefox Live Bookmarks).
Well I hope you understand, from now on I’ll call it Feed.

What is RSS and Atom?
RSS and Atom is basically just same. They contain informations wrapped in XML. You can ask Google if you want to know better about the difference of those two.

How to subscribe to the Feed?
If you’re using firefox, look at the address bar, there’s orange icon on the right of the address bar.

If the site doesn’t have the icon, it doesn’t mean that the site doesn’t have Feed. Some sites put link like “Subscribe to us” or something like that on the page of the site.

After you clicked the icon you’ll encounter a simple page that ask you how you want to subscribe. You can use Firefox Live Bookmark to subscribe as a test. You must enable Bookmarks Toolbar to read the feed. You can read the feed by clicking it. You can click the headline of the feed to go to the page specified by the feed.

If you don’t like the Bookmarks Toolbar, you can read the feed at Bookmarks>Bookmarks Toolbar. It’s very inefficient but if you like it that way you can do it.

Now you already know what is Feed and how to subscribe to it. The reason why you need Feed filtering is you can subscribe to multiple website with just one feed. If you want to follow three or four series, you only need to aggregate all the feeds into one feed.

Requirements
For this tutorial you need to have Yahoo account and Google account.

How to filter
I use Manga Updates to do the testing.

1. Copy this link -> http://www.mangaupdates.com/rss.php
2. Go to Yahoo Pipes (You need to be logged in to Yahoo)
3. At the top of the page, choose “Create a pipe”
4. Drag “Fetch Feed” module at the left side of the page to the center of the page
5. Paste the Manga Updates RSS URL into the box. You can input more URL by pressing the “+URL”
6. Click “Operators” menu at the left side of the page, there’ll be new modules there
7. Drag “Filter” module to the center of the page
8. At the first box, change it to “Permit”, and at the second box, change it to “any”
9. Choose “item.title” for the first category box and leave the second one
10. Input your filter at the third box, for example “ai kora”. You can input more rules by pressing the “+Rules”
11. At the bottom of “Fetch Feed” box you’ll notice there’s circle there, click it and drag the blue line to the circle at the top of “Filter” Box until they’re connected. Now it should look like this (click for larger image)
    
12. Click the circle at the bottom of “Filter” box and drag it to the “Pipe Output” box. Now all the three boxes should be connected
13. At the top right of the page, there’s save button there. Save your work. After that you’ll notice “Run pipe” at the middle top of the page. Click the link to see the pipe you created. You can edit the pipe again by choosing “Edit Source” at that page
14. At the left of “Get as RSS” you’ll notice “+ Google” button. (click for larger image)
    
15. Click the button and you’ll get into a page that tells you to choose Choose “Add to Google Reader” (You need to be logged in to Google)
16. At the Google Reader page, replace the link in your address bar to http://www.google.com/reader and press enter so that the page reloaded
17. At the right of the address bar, click the Feed icon, then at the loaded page it should shows “<your username>’s reading list in Google Reader”. If not, you’re doing it wrong. Just reload the page using the url above
18. Subscribe to the feed

Now the tutorial is over. You must be asking why I use Google Reader. It’s because Yahoo Pipes simply just filtering the feed without caching. Imagine if one day you can’t read the feeds, you’ll lose the feeds. You’ll notice the difference in these images. First image is Yahoo Pipes’ RSS, and the second is Google Reader’s RSS.

The limit for Google Reader’s Entries is 20 feeds. The oldest feed will be overwritten with the new one. Even though the feed is overwritten, you can still access it at the Google Reader page. I don’t know when Google delete these feeds. But if you want to unsubcribe the feed, just press the feed, go to feed settings>unsubscribe. The feed’s entries will be gone.

You can create more filter, Yahoo Pipes is powerful, here’s my filter (click for larger image)

I use one more filter to block “dj” word (dj means doujin), I don’t want anything with that word to be in my Feed. You can also create more module filter to filter Fansubber or Scanlator.

Afterwords
• I already gave you the basics, so now create your own filter as you like
• Actually you can aggregate all feeds in Google Reader then you can filter all the feeds using Yahoo Pipes, I don’t want my Google Reader has lot of entries so I filter first than filter later.
• The reason why I useYahoo Pipes is because it’s powerful and have many features like sharing feed (although I don’t use it). You can do many things with it. The other two filter feed websites are Feed Rinse and Feed Sifter. If you’re interested you can compare them to Yahoo Pipes and decide which one you want to use.

Thanks for reading