O'Reilly Publishing has a series called Short Cuts that is intended to "spotlight one specific topic, usually in fewer than 100 pages." We're excited to announce that there is a great new Short Cut on Pipes!

This Short Cut shows you how to use Yahoo! Pipes. Examples illustrate the workings of every Yahoo! Pipes module (more than two dozen), and show how to incorporate these Pipes into your own web pages.

Thanks for being patient, the Pipes are flowing again! For those just tuning in, we had some unplanned downtime on Wednesday, May 17th. The service is back to normal.

We thought it would be useful to showcase a few Pipes that use the new Geo features we announced.

• Apartment Near Something was one of the original examples we created to demonstrate the usefulness of Pipes. Now you can search for an apartment close to something and plot the output on a map!
• Kiva Loans by Location takes a listing of open microloans on Kiva.org and GeoCodes each item based on the nationality of the entrepreneur requesting a loan. The end result allows users to browse a interactive Yahoo! map to see where Kiva is currently fund-raising.
• Photos Near Napa Wineries annotates Yahoo! Local results for Napa Wineries with images from Flickr that were taken nearby.
• Socialight Flickrin' takes location-based Sticky Notes from Socialight.com and searches for pictures from Flickr based on the content of the Sticky Note. This example demonstrates how to use the Location Extractor Module to ensure that a feed containing GeoData is properly marked up.

We can't wait to see how you use the new Geo features in Pipes! As always, we hope you'll share your feedback and suggestions with us.

The Pipes team is proud to announce two new features that we've been working on that enhance our support for GeoData.

• First, we added a interactive Yahoo! Map to the runpage of any Pipe containing GeoData. To see this feature in action run the Apartment Near Something Pipe. Here's a still image of what the map looks like:
• Second, we added an additional output renderer which allows Pipes containing GeoData to be emitted as a KML file. If there's GeoData in a Pipe you can find a link to the KML output at the bottom of a Pipes runpage listed in the Tools section. It's possible to use the KML output in a variety of ways including in Google Earth.
  

We posted a followup entry that highlights some example Pipes that make use the new Geo features.

In addition to our enhanced geolocation support there are some other improvements to announce:

• You can now inline edit the Title and Description text listed on the runpage for your Pipes.
• We've added the ability to filter dates using the options "before" and "after" in the Filter Module. These parameters can accept dates in a variety of relative formats such as "n days ago", "now" and "today".