Tutorial Thursday
There are all kinds of websites available for finding great deals, but a lot of times it takes some extra work to find the items that you’re looking for. With the holiday season coming up I’m sure you’ll be trying to hunt down all kinds of stuff for friends and family, but you don’t have to go out of your way to save some money.
We have already laid out several tools that can help you along the way, such as price drop notifiers and Black Friday savings, but we’re going to take it one step further. We turned once again to Yahoo! Pipes because of the sheer power it harnesses. Unlike with our custom software updater there will be little work for you to do this time around.
What do you have to do? Pull up the CyberNet Deal Finder that I’ve already taken the liberty of creating. You should see a screen similar to this, but without the coloring or numbering:
Using the diagram above here is what you have to do:
- You can enter in up to five different items that you want to track.
Tip: Put spaces before and after each item for more accurate searching. For example, if you’re looking for a “table” you’ll want to put a space before and after the name, like this: ” table ” (ignore the quotes, but note the space before and after the word). If you don’t do this it will match any words containing “table” such as “tablet”.
- By default I fill in the form with 5 of the most popular deal sites. I decided to let users customize the sites because most of the deals available in the feeds I supply are for the United States only.
- Run the pipe and examine the preview at the bottom of the page to make sure it is what you expected. You may not see any results initially, it all depends on how common your search words are.
- If everything looks good go ahead and subscribe to the feed. All of the settings that you configured in the first two steps will automatically be stored in the feed’s URL.
If you have more than 5 items that you want to track that’s not a problem. Just create more than one feed, or you can clone the pipe that I’ve created and edit it accordingly.
So now it is time to prepare for the holidays and watch for the falling prices!
This is just one of the hundreds of CyberNotes we have done. You can find more of them by visiting our CyberNotes category, or by subscribing to our CyberNotes feed. We also have a full feed available if you want to receive all of our articles in your reader!
Tags: CyberNotes, Web Sites, Customize, Deals, Feeds, How To, Tips And Tricks
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