Rather than just making a dummy app I hoped instead to get something that functioned and updated regularly.
Enter Pipes by Yahoo an RSS mashup aggregator type thing. This has been available for a while now yet it still offers great value. What's really cool is the user interface. It's all drag and drop and done through on screen graphics.
At first it's a little daunting to know what you are expected to do, or to even get it to function. But after following the video tutorials made available (RECOMMENDED) I have managed to amalgamate a suitable feed for the app, Gossip Blox.
Specifically this 'Pipe' takes the RSS feed from heatworld and digitalspy and strips them of surplus news entries older than a day. It then removes through a keyword search any duplicate content. Lastly, the content is trimmed to a mere three posts and ordered with the newest first.
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This is all well and good. I had high hopes for implementing the designs that I had set out for the app. However, Yahoo have made presenting your pipe sort of accessible and sort of not. You can grab the script which they provide as a 'badge' and embed it, which I tried. Thereafter I tried styling and positioning the content through CSS however it didn't work as I expected. A lot of the formatting is overridden (no doubt purposefully) through the scripting. Certain properties are passable in the head of the HTML but not enough to enable the design I wanted. :(
Sooooo, although I've found a great tool, which I would recommend to anybody in need of one, this testing will have to go down as research and experimentation.
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