I’ve been using Yahoo! Pipes quite a bit recently, partly because it’s so easy to use, and partly because it outputs data in RSS and JSON format.

For instance, if you decide to use the RSS output, you can use SimplePie to parse the data and display it, or you can output the JSON feed using jQuery. I’ve found the later method to be very quick and efficient, and it avoids the need to setup cache folders and cronjobs to automatically parse your feeds at set intervals. (more…)

If you want to display a number of photos on your website, jQuery Infinite Carousel is a very good option. This carousel works really well when you have a list of images on your page, but it threw up a number of problems when calling images dynamically on page load (I.e. your latest Flickr Photostream or set). (more…)

I recently wrote a tutorial on using SimplePie to parse your Google Reader shared items Atom feed (or any other RSS/Atom feed for that matter). However, after implementing it on this site (in the sidebar here) and testing it for a month-or-so, I’ve found page load times are very slow whenever SimplePie parses the feed and updates the cache. I had it set to request an update every hour (3600 seconds), which in hindsight is probably too often for my needs. (more…)