A Day in Paradise

The first version of this post was eaten when Y! Pipes decided to take down firefox (seemed to happen a lot when I was hovering over the sources waiting for the tooltip top pop up – FF1.5.0.9)

Y! Pipes is a cool toy. There is a lot of interesting functionality, but a lot that could still be added. My problem is the scalabilty aspects of it. It looks fairly resource intensive on the part of Y! and with every additional feature that’s added more resources would be needed. In the half hour I spent playing with my pipe, I already created a monstor that takes 4.86 seconds to generate. And if I were to do any serious (and add specific tools) then I would need even more generating power.

There are a couple extra things I would like to see right off:

1. It needs an exclusion gate, possibly as an option of the union operator, where I can select all items from feeds a-y which do not exist in feed z.
2. I had some trouble parsing some old google RSS feeds I had. I was about to yell conspiracy but I re-generated the google urls and everything worked
3. I couldn’t see how to extract/interact with information directly from a feed. I want to embed a flickr image into the description of my news article, but couldn’t figure out how that was done.

If anyone wants to clone my pipe and fix it, feel free. Anyway, I loved it… reminded me of ning, but without the code