RSS is So Good But Slow

Over the weekend I have been working on my portfolio site quite a lot and it has been going very well. I have started working up a visual styling and I have come to understand the layout tools in Google mashups editor (GME) much better. My next task is to deal with some of the information model issues and then I might start putting together the final code. Then of course I have to make my content.

As my content is all RSS from blogs I have been looking at various tools. One that I have been familiar with for some time however never used in a serious way is Yahoo Pipes. It is a great little tool which is a lot like Shake (node based editing) however it differers in one way that I think is quite bad. Shake lets you "fileOut" many things in one render however Yahoo Pipes is limited to only one output feed at a time. For instance I could make many versions of a file in Shake, different sizes, different keys, different anything and then export them all at the same time and have it create a clip of image files where each fileOut node points. In Yahoo Pipes on the other hand I have to either nest a pipe in many other pipes to get similar functionality or remake it in each case. All this said I think there may be one possible solution which is using a dynamic url for the RSS address. I have only recently been introduced to this technique and not yet tested it, which brings me to Dapper.

Dapper is a cool little too that I found while looking at other peoples GME sites. It seems to be a little like Yahoo Pipes crossed with OSX 10.5's implementation of dashboard widgets (as in widgets as clips). Essentially what Dapper lets you do is extract an RSS feed from a normal website and build it around your preferences. It also lets you use dynamic URLs to include things like searches into your Dapper feed. For instance you could, as they show in this example, extract a feed which is dependent on a search on a site. You reference that search by including the search term into the URL of the feed that you are rendering. This is really great I think and I hope to be able to use it soon. For the time being I do not have a use in mind but I think I may need a feature like this for one of the things I wanted to put in my portfolio site. We will see.

Does anyone have any good ideas?