ecently I have been playing around with free online mash-up tools like 
dapper, Yahoo pipes, twitter feed etc.
I used them to create a rss feed for 💀upcoming Australian Computer Society events and 💀Young IT Events.
Using the tools was remarkability easy. I created a extraction engine in dapper by clicking on elements of the ACS Website while it was loaded into the dapper webapp and entering descriptions of the selected elements. I reused the engine by pointing it at several similar webpages. I then used
Y! Pipes to join the information together into one feed.The ACS is revamping its website with a improved look in July 2009 with a total replacement of the website in coming in 2010.
Also ACS has come out with a twitter news feed.
RSS Feeds mentioned:
Updated: 2009
Event RSS feeds and news RSS were suppose to be added in the July 2009 website upgrade. I thought that these feeds will probably not be useful after that. However they still work fine. Since this was first published I have used this technique with the AIIA, AIPM and Churchill Club websites as well.
There have also been some new ACS twitter accounts set up.
New RSS Feeds
Updated: 2026
ACS state twitter / X accounts where deleted, only national accounts are now active
dapper was brought by Yahoo and discontinued in 2010in 2013 Yahoo came out with their own version of dapper
in 2015 Yahoo discontinuedY! Pipes and the resurrected dapper
in 2015 Yahoo discontinued
Y! Pipes and the resurrected dapperModern Tools that do the same job
| Old tool | What it did | Modern equivalents |
|---|---|---|
| Yahoo! Pipes | Fetch → parse → filter → transform → combine → publish | n8n, Make, Huginn, Zapier |
| Dapper | Point at a webpage and extract structured fields | Apify, Import.io, Browse AI, Octoparse |
| Pipes + Dapper together | Scrape websites, mash data, transform it and republish | Apify + n8n is probably the closest modern combination |
| RSS mashup tools | Turn sites into feeds / combine feeds | RSS.app, Feedly, n8n, Huginn |
| Screen-scraping browser extensions | Select elements from a webpage | Web Scraper, Browse AI, Apify |
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