Advanced Streamline Techniques
You couldn’t tell judging by the tardiness of Mimbo Pro (ha), but I’ve always been (unhealthily) obsessed with finding ways to do things more efficiently. It’s what inspired this previous post (”Streamline Your Process: RSS Feeds, Bookmarks, Frameworks, Design Resources”).
Justin from Metafluence started a project which takes things ten steps further in a quest to create a more intelligent dashboard. With mixed results, he integrates services like Netvibes, Pipes, AideRSS, and Dapper to streamline a huge influx of data.
While I have ideas that involve aggregating and filtering Dapper created feeds in Pipes, sending them out to AideRSS, then resorting them in Pipes based on the AideRSS ranking, and delivering them in a Sprout widget embedded in a Netvibes dashboard; it turns out that is a bad idea…
Mashing up so many different services, most of which are in beta, around a loosely standardized language is a difficult and dynamic task.
Seriously ambitious stuff for the average user. The ability to combine and refine multiple feeds is a crucial step for efficiency freaks. But it’s hard to tell sometimes whether tracking information is getting easier or much more difficult.
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I enjoy using my dashboard, but I have a lot of ideas about how I could refine it. I’m noticing that the more I tweak the Pipes and whatnot, that I’m creating a significant amount of overhead. I’m beginning to suspect that I’ll need to define some best practices for myself in order to make sure I don’t create some hacked together behemoth that becomes too unwieldy to manage.
I know what you mean about unwieldy - I find myself creating systems to streamline workflow that are more time-consuming than the work itself.