Monday, March 16, 2009

Pipes!

Last night I spent some time getting started on this grand new idea of using free online services for everything (blogging, photos, bookmarking, tweeting, etc) so that I no longer had to run a CMS for each of these on my own host.

The easy part was signing up for all the services. The hard part was going to be collecting the rss feeds and munging them into single feed and formatting it for display on my home page at fuzzyslogic.com.

Luckily I recalled reading about Yahoo Pipes a long time ago. I imagine I dismissed it as a silly way for people who weren't as haxy as me to munge together information from all over the place. With my new found open mind I decided to take a look at it. Needless to say it does exactly what I need and is actually quite a powerful tool. What's more you even end up creating amazing looking flow diagrams which look really impressive in screenshots!



So now I've successfully jumped the "collect all the feeds into a central rss" part of the problem. Now I'm onto creating a layout I like and setting it up as the front page of fuzzyslogic.com!