Yahoo pipes. It was so great at creating rss feeds and custom workflows. There are replacements now like Zapier and n8n but loved that. Also google reader which is mentioned multiple times already.
(It’s not super obvious, especially on mobile, but once you see the site, just scroll down to see the content)
I don't know if it was Yahoo Pipes that died, or a mainstream internet based on open protocols and standards.
Then all those sites I used to post on stopped supporting rss one by one and finally pipes was killed off.
For a while I used a python library called riko that did the same thing as pipes without the visual editor. I have to thank it for getting me off php and into python.
It has the advantage of being open source, has well defined and stable APIs and a solid backend. Plus 10+ years of constant development with many learnings around how to implement flow based programming visually.
I used the Node-RED frontend to create Browser-Red[^2] which is a Node-RED that solely executes in the browser, no server required. It does not support all Node-RED functionality but gives a good feel for using Node-RED and flow based programming.
The second project with which I am using Node-RED frontend is Erlang-Red[^3] which is Node-RED with an Erlang backend. Erlang is better suited to flow based programming than NodeJS, hence this attempt to demonstrate that!
Node-RED makes slightly different assumptions than Yahoo! Pipes - input ports being the biggest: all nodes in Node-RED have either zero or one input wires, nodes in Yahoo! Pipes had multiple input wires.
A good knowledge of jQuery is required but that makes it simpler to get into the frontend code - would be my argument ;) I am happy to answer questions related to Node-RED, email in bio.
[^1]: https://nodered.org
[^2]: https://cdn.flowhub.org
Apache Karavan: https://karavan.space/ Kaoto (Red Hat): https://kaoto.io
Both are end 2 end usable within vscode.