Find free booze in NYC using Yahoo Pipes

So I know that I’m pretty late getting on the whole Yahoo Pipes bandwagon, but I decided to play around with it last weekend. Inspired by the economic recession I’ve setup a pipe that finds all of the free cocktail parties, vendor promotions, gallery openings and open bars in NYC. I did a few searches and couldn’t find anything similar to what I wanted so I thought I’d give it and shot and see what the process is like. I’m still getting the hang of it and I’m going to continue to tweak it and add more sources.

Yahoo Pipes is an incredibly cool tool to filter down streams of information to only what is relevant to you, or what falls within the parameters you define. You add in feeds from other sites or networks and then can run them through keyword filters (such as “No cover”, “vodka” and block anything with the word “ticket”). It’s both easy to use and really powerful. I was able to setup this pipe in only an hour or two, most of that spent searching the internet for reliable and relevant sources. It’s also a little daunting in all that it can accomplish, I’m still trying to get all of wrinkles ironed out and build in the functionality I want. It is still very much a work in progress. Since a lot of the sites I often check for open bars don’t have their own RSS feeds I’m excited about the Fetch Page and Fetch Data Modules that Yahoo offers. I can parse the sites HTML & XML for relevant information.

There’s more data on the web than just RSS and Atom feeds. This module can access and extract data from XML and JSON (Javascript Object Notation) data sources on the web. This data can then be converted into an RSS feed or merged with other data in your Pipe.

Overall, I love how open it is and all of the interesting and useful mashups that people are doing with it. It’s pretty inspiring. I can use pipes to find an apartment close to a park, find jobs close to my apartment, and now find booze for when I’m broke!

Find out where you’re drinking tonight:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=JLg4FtgI3hGmdQK5BB50VA