Monthly Archive for April, 2008

Revisiting my tumblog

I’ve made several improvements to my tumblog.

Previously, I merely plugged in the RSS output from Yahoo! Pipes to Feedburner, and served up the content using Buzzboost. Using techniques from Cristiano Betta’s lifestream and elsewhere, I simplified and modularized the Yahoo! Pipes mashup.

I then used the pipe’s JSON output and styled it with some simple CSS. I didn’t want too much dependence on other JavaScript libraries so I used native code as much as possible, except for dynamically loading the JSON object from Pipes (for which I used the JSONscriptRequest class). I’m still having trouble getting the logic of reloading the content asynchronously: for now, I simply destroy the child element containing the tumblog items and rewrite everything — expensive, I know.

I’ve also been thinking of creating a Google Gadget out of this, but the iGoogle API’s FetchFeedAsJSON method is somewhat limited. I may have to use my current approach of dynamically creating a JSON script request into the gadget.

Well, without too much fanfare, the code is over here, and the tumblog is right here.