More with GeoRSS and Yahoo! Pipes
Sunday, December 2nd, 2007Since my initial experiments with pipes, the Pipes manager, Jonathan Trevor was good enough to leave me a comment pointing out that they were about to release a feature that would help with the username/password problem. The feature he was talking about was private field support and has since been released. It is now possible to publish pipes that contain sensitive information without making that information public. Also since then at Ublip, we have released an online demo which provides a good source of data that I can publish without any privacy concerns.
First, I published a very simple pipe consuming the demo feed and publishing the results to a map. As you can see, the username and password are visible as part of the URL in this pipe.
Next, I used the new private field support to hide the username and password. I could have simply hidden the entire URL in a private string and used the URL builder to convert it into an URL. But to make it a little easier to modify, I moved the username and password into separate fields and a string replace module to insert them into the URL. I imaging that there is a more elegant way to do this, but I haven’t found one yet. Here is the resulting pipe:
The only thing missing is the ability to use https, which still does not seem to work. I am still not quite sure if it is supposed to be supported or not. Some forum posts discuss ways to work around it while others seem to indicate success using it.
