Planet Python syndication and Yahoo! Pipes bugs 2009-09-18

I finally broke down and asked to have this blog added to Planet Python. More readers can’t hurt, right? But I don’t actually want everything I write here to appear on Planet Python. I definitely write some things which would be off-topic there. LiveJournal has tagging, but apparently it won’t serve up an RSS feed filtered by tag (if I overlooked some feature, please let me know!). Then I remembered Yahoo! Pipes, a pretty neat web app that provides a GUI-based web mangling service. It can grab all kinds of inputs, perform all kinds of operations on the data thus retrieved, and serve the result.

It was a pretty trivial pipe I created to grab my LiveJournal RSS feed, filter out everything without the “python” keyword, and serve the result. Only one hitch. It seems Yahoo! Pipes mangles whitespace inside pre tags. Oh dear. So basically any code I try to post will get mangled by the pipe and be more or less unreadable.

Yahoo knows about this problem (people have been complaining about it for years). Bummer. There’s a post in their suggestions forum about the problem that’s a year old: < suggestions.yahoo.com detail ?prop="Pipes&fid=96906">. Maybe if all my readers go vote it up or comment on it, it will get some attention and my posts on Planet Python will appear as intended.