Need a Flickr RSS feed that includes and excludes tags

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Yahoo pipes is exactly what this is for. The problem that you're seeing is strange. They aren't one-time; the pipe should re-fetch and re-run each time you query it. I have made many pipes to assemble custom RSS feeds and they've worked for years.

I just added that pipe with the configuration of lego/starwars to my Google Reader. Let's see if it updates.

fyi, here's what I put for the inputs to that pipe: lego, legos clone|zombie|ww2|halo|star+wars|brickarms|brickforge|trade|faction|wwii|stormtrooper|clonetrooper Here's an example of an image that my plain old "lego" tag subscription caught but the pipes one has not (yet, maybe): http://www.flickr.com/photos/61225718@N08/5867036647/

pyro979, I'm not sure the Greasemonkey script will work because it's acting on the RSS feed, and the feed itself doesn't include tags. So it works if the word "brickarms" is in the text of the Flickr image, but not if it only appears as a tag.

Legomancer, I've done almost exactly that kind of searching of RSS feeds for years in the hunt for new words using several hundred keywords which would turn up thousands of hits a day. The list of things I am just plain weary of seeing all the time is more than 900 items long, even after using all available exclusion options. :/ I've used the script pyro979 links to and it can work enough of the time to take *some* of the unneeded content out of your way, if you use Google Reader. I've also used Yahoo Pipes to filter. That, too, can work. But as you say, both require that the words appear in the right place, and that's simply not always the case. So, my best advice (and what I ended up doing, more or less, with Google News) was to start with restrictive Flickr combination tag results and just accept that you are not going to see all the awesome stuff. You may miss something. C'est la vie. Maybe combine keywords http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/lego+blocks/, which shows few of the bad results. Others are http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/lego+sculpture/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/lego+art/?page=2. You'll likely think of more.

(By the way, using keyword inclusion as a MUST INCLUDE restrictor is a lovely art that is often more brute and also often more useful than using a NOT excluder, which gets to the heart of the http://newadonis.creighton.edu/hsl/searching/Recall-Precision.html.)

One more bit of advice on coming up with inclusion keywords to use: Take a look at the successful Lego photos, the ones you've posted to your blog, and list all of their keywords. Find out which keywords are most common. Then look at a lot of the Lego images you don't want. Find their common keywords. Then compare the lists. The common keywords on the good Lego photos that *don't* appear as keywords on the bad Lego photos are the keywords you should use to build your Flickr tag URLs.

Mo, that won't work because most of the photos I like have only the tag "lego". This is because of what I tend to feature. Instead of "check out this cool Lego spaceship" which is territory well-covered by other blogs, I like to focus on things like graffiti, tattoos, foreign knockoffs, architecture, design, and also just kids playing with Lego. For what I'm interested in, about the only thing they'll all have in common is the tag "lego", so it's the exclusions that are going to be important. I really appreciate these suggestions, and I'm not trying to be the guy who has a problem for every solution, just pointing out the thorniness of the problem. I'm about to start googling for "an introduction on how to use APIs" to try and bang something together myself. Worst case scenario: I keep doing as I have been for three years now, as it's not killing me, I just wish there were a better way.