Programming Notes, March 2007:

I have been fooling around with pipes. No, not crackpipes or PVC pipes, Yahoo pipes. I must say, beta release notwithstanding; I am disappointed.

Admittedly my programming skills are rusty however, Yahoo wants you to buy into their nice javascript GUI interface as a way for the blue collar programmer to do neato things with feeds without the pain of programming. It is helpful that I understand what the modules are supposed to do, I can dink around and make them work but they do not work.

Maybe that is a little too harsh; they work just fine everywhere you can view an RSS, ATOM and so on. In MyYahoo, Live Bookmarks, Bloglines and even Thunderbird. Hmmm, so where do they not work you ask? Why, Yahoo 360! I should be able to take the URL for my pipe, slap it into the feed widget on 360 and bingo-bango, content. Sadly, no.

I even got off the frustration train and asked for help in the discussion forums. No response from the "help guys" and one insipid reply from some user who did not even take the time to look at the problem.

On the other hand I am totally jazzed about what I created; a DIY feed from the likes of D*I*YPlanner, MAKE, Instructables and DailyDIY to name a few in the big honkin feed. Next I created a miniDIY which is well, smaller.


Until Y either provides some real help or fixes their own widget-a-module thingies, I'm done with the pipe to 360 project. There are better ways to accomplish what I intended. In the meantime, all you DIYers out there, there is a big honkin feed, scan for new projects to your heart's content.

Tags: DIY diy feeds RSS ATOM pipes yahoo 360 "DIY(dee-eye-why)" miniDIY