This is the comp I did when I was messing around with ideas (and was testing out background textures – basically, this all started with a yummy leather texture I found on iStockPhoto). The original iteration had each feed item making a stripe across the entire screen, with the main content in a nice container on top of that. Which is one of those things that looks lovely and simple on paper, but turns out to be the world’s biggest pain in the ass in practice. Yes, I know, it’s all about z-index and what have you, but there were floats, and they were actively campaigning against me, and…wait, you totally don’t care about any of this, do you? Especially because, once I finally got it to work, I decided it looked ghetto and nixed the stripe idea.

This marks my first foray into Yahoo! Pipes, as well…and it was, surprisingly, much less painful than I’d thought it would be. Sure, it’s ugly, and I could probably have done it more efficiently if I had any bloody clue what I was doing…but it works, and isn’t that really the point? I’m pulling in feeds from all sorts of different places, and spitting them into my sidebar all neatly styled and prettily updating, and I’m quite pleased with the result. Especially since I used PHP to handle the feed. Which I totally don’t know! But I managed to hack my way through it without asking Not So for help, even once.*

Let me know if it looks funny to you. I mean, weird-funny, not funny-funny. Or maybe I don’t.

*Full disclosure: I did ask Not So for help, but not about the feed/PHP thing. And I ended up not needing his help anyway, so it’s totally like I did it by myself. Right? Right.