So, you’ve got a client that wants to manage their website content. They want to be able to update every field on their Flash website, er I mean “experience”. But there’s a catch… they FEAR technology and complex interfaces. They feel that WordPress is too complex, never mind a proprietary custom build CMS.

What’s a developer to do?

THIS:

1. Create a Google Docs Spreadsheet – For this example I’m using row 1 to hold the field vars.

2. Set it to publish as a webpage – Be sure to select CSV format. Be sure to set it to re-publish when any editing occurs.

3. Set up Yahoo Pipes to fetch the CSV data – Set appropriate data mapping, renaming and use Regex to ensure data is proper.

4. Publish Pipe as your favorite data feed – For this example I chose JSON.

5. Load JSON into your Flash app. BOOM!

Bladow, your client can now go on doing what they’ve always done — edit an excel doc ( Google Doc ). They make changes there, it changes on their fancy experiential website.

Genius.

Chances are you publish content using multiple platforms dissipated across the interweb. For example, you may publish photo’s to Flickr, video’s to Vimeo and blogs to WordPress. While each of these sites provide you with an RSS feed, a viewer would have to subscribe to each to be updated with all that you publish. Luckily Yahoo Pipes has provided an easy solution. Pipes is essentially a tool that enables non coders to visually architect an application. While it provides a toolset to perform many valuable and robust time saving application functions, for this example we’ll only concentrate on it’s XML and RSS data aggregation. The following screenshot demonstrates how easy it is to aggregate all of your separate RSS feeds into one feed that viewers can subscribe to.

The example above shows the aggregation of all my publishing points including Flickr, Vimeo, WordPress, Google Reader and a custom feed I made that enables me to use WordPress as a CMS. After creating the aggregated feed in Pipes I then use Feedburner to track usage stats. The result is http://feeds.feedburner.com/chrisTeso. Please update your feed and subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/chrisTeso if you’re currently subscribed to an older one.

Yahoo pipes – redonculously sexy visual coding engine that shall enable me to save countless hours while also providing a slick vehicle for hackery extraordinaire. Thanks Amber!

Control the music in my entire office and each of its separate zones from my iphone? Shit, yea.

I need a moleskin sketch book. All the cool kids have them.

In a classic case of cosmic irony, I just stole some chocolate out of bennies desk while he’s getting his face drilled.