Insufficiently Abstract Pipes

For the last couple of months I've been sitting on a CGI script that would aggregate all my content for my personal site. Part of the reason is caching: the script doesn't have any, and it turns out that XML::Feed isn't Storable friendly, which knocks out my first approach.

So when I had a think about what Yahoo's Pipes promises, I thought it might be worth a look. I could get the service to do all the heavy lifting, hope they had a sensible caching policy (and if not, well, at least it was Someone Else's Problem), and then just format a single RSS feed locally.

Sadly, there's a major problem. The aforementioned XML::Feed Perl module does a wonderful job of hiding the mess of formats that labour under the acronym RSS and the name Atom. If you want to soft by date, you can do so easily.  (In fact, you get lovely Perl DateTime objects. I can't sing DateTime's praises enough, even if it does look daunting at first.) Pipes, however, doesn't. I can sort my Vox Atom feed by its pubDate property, or my delicious and husk RSS feeds by dc:date, but neither sort has a date format in common, so I can't sort them once they're output.

I had a quick look to see if there was an obvious way of doing a date transformation on an element of an item, but unless I'm missing something it's far from obvious. I could write a small web service and call it, but that's a lot of work, and I might as well do things locally if I'm that bothered. So I've given up, but not before writing this, because it seems like a natural thing to handle in such a high-level environment, and I'm surprised they don't.