Yahoo Pipes: a powerful tool for some of those small things...

I just discovered Yahoo Pipes a couple of days ago. After some clicking I got the hang of it and realized all the nice little things that can be done with it. First, as always I took the "a-bit-too-long-road" approach and tried to make an application that fetched an apartment listing rss feed based on the parameters the user put in. With that list it would go to a web page for each item, fetch the address information and plot it on Yahoo Maps. This is all possible and should come together relatively easily. I got it working to the point where the output is a nice JSON structure, but the location information was not fetched.

This is the point I realized that maybe Pipes is not meant for this even though it is possible. The end application was sluggish and the tool itself still lacks some basic tools (like extracting a string and outputting it directly to the end pipe).

What I ended up doing is piping my delicious blog bookmarks' feeds to a single rss feed. This was dead simple and quick. Have a look (a bit sluggish since it fetches all of the feed items for each feed...).

Something to begin with: a very nice Firefox theme

I was searching through the net and tried to find out a good looking Firefox theme that was as close to the native theme as possible, but with Vista Aero look-and-feel. This is what I found. It's exactly what I was looking for... great!