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.