For a couple of months now, I am using emacs exclusively for a lot of things. Pretty much everything except web browsing. For it, I use luakit. I use emacs for coding, blogging, note taking, file system management, emails, rss feeds, todo management… pretty much 80% of my computer time is spent inside emacs.

However, there was a problem. I use gnus for email and rss feeds. Problem was, I have about 10-15 rss feeds and when I want to check them, I start gnus. However, because of the number of the feeds it would take a lot of time for gnus to connect to each server and update the feed list. So, I thought there should be some way to reduce this time. But I wasn’t able to think of something for some time. I tried searching emacs wiki for some improvements but couldn’t find any…

Then, I remembered something that I tried about 2-3 years ago. I don’t remember exactly when but it was good. However then, I didn’t have any use of it. But in my current situation, it could be absolutely valuable. It is Yahoo! pipes. I took all my feeds and created four pipes to gather all those rss feeds. So, now, instead of connecting to several servers for feeds, gnus only have to connect to a yahoo server and fetch four rss feeds for updates. It has reduced the start up time of gnus has been greatly reduced.

Also, by doing this, all my feeds will be stored somewhere safe and I won’t have to jumble opml files from now on. Also, when I need to add a feed, I will just add it to the pipe. No need to add/remove feeds from gnus. It will be handled automagically.

If you don’t know about it, check it out. Yahoo pipes can do a lot of things other than this. In fact, it is a very simplistic example of what it’s capable of… Anyways, if you want to check out my pipes, go here.