Pipes is such a cool tool, but until recently I couldn’t think of any reason to use it. Since we had a 5.6 earthquake yesterday and another smaller one today, I went online searching for earthquake information feeds. I found the USGS Shakemap for northern California, which has a feed listed on the page. Unfortunately, the feed is pretty annoying: it’s not limited to northern California and its in ascending order. I thought to myself, “this would be useful if I could just filter it for what I wanted.” Then I realized that I could do exactly that with Pipes.

So, without further adieu, my very first pipe: Earthquakes in Northern California. I used the filter module on the latitude and longitude values provides to narrow the area down to northern California. I then used the sort module to sort in descending order. Lastly, I used the location extractor module to add location information into the feed, allowing the pipe page to display the information on a Yahoo! map. This pipe has already been added to my reader, and I hope you find it useful as well.

Disclaimer: Any viewpoints and opinions expressed in this article are those of Nicholas C. Zakas and do not, in any way, reflect those of my employer, my colleagues, Wrox Publishing, O'Reilly Publishing, or anyone else. I speak only for myself, not for them.