Here is the published Pipe that powers my Recent News widget on Soft Machine: OPML feed items newest 20 with prepended
There are a few details I don’t need to go into, at the moment… One thing I will say, however, is that the aggregator pipes I looked at either didn’t work or were extremely inefficient. Others weren’t suitable, or were fragile, or very specific to a task. This Pipe is general, efficient, and quite good at producing recent items from OPML files.
The only ongoing upkeep required is to re-export my subscriptions to the cloud when I make changes I want to see reflected here!
In all, I’d say the capabilities of Yahoo Pipes are good, but you may not find what you need easily.
Recent News Pipe for Soft Machine
Soft Machine³ 