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Well, a tumultuous relationship with Yahoo Pipes has ended after a long struggle with various bugs, inefficiencies, annoyances and finally service refusal. There’s no doubt Pipes is a very useful and clever system, but it has some very serious downsides:

• Caching – every pipe is rigorously cached, and updates are so infrequent as to allow bugs to go unspotted during testing, and suddenly rise after the fact.
• Crap editor – I know YQL allows you to actually type out your stuff, but Pipes forces you to use its extremely buggy visual editor, which (among other things) fails to resize properly, does not allow copy and paste, frequently puts operators inside the wrong loop (and thus overwrites a painstakingly written item creator or whatever), seems to suddenly stop working at random – especially if one of your feeds is broken or returning malformed data, which results in ALL of your pipe, even unconnected nodes, breaking ingloriously.
• Usage limits – despite the fierce caching, they still apply a fairly unsatisfactory usage limit, and without warning will shut down your pipes if they go over the limit.
• Inefficient operators – sometimes you really have to go several times around the block to do very simple things, and you’ll quickly run into these issues.

All in all, I know Pipes is free and efficient, but upon my pipes being blocked because of a bug at my end which made too many requests, I had to quickly write my own PHP version to do the same job – and I found I had more control, it was on the whole an easier experience, and I have control over my own caching and debugging.

The people who use pipes are invariably developers – so as a word of warning: if you can do it yourself, take the time to do so, don’t rely wholely on third party services.

Duncan Timiney has recently announced and released a new Chaos remake of his own, and in addition started a Chaos remakes wiki. I’ve updated the info on the old Chaos Enhanced build and I’ll definitely be helping maintain the overall wiki.

Not much new information yet on my new version in development, but what I can say is that the first release will definitely include online multiplayer ‘out of the box’. Exciting times!

Something I’ve been working on alongside the other 1,407 things in the pipeline…check back often for updates! Cursor keys or WASD to move, space to fire, and page up/page down to change your ship’s speed. I’ll let you work out the rest for yourself 🙂

Oh, and click somewhere inside the game to enable control!

Play at half size or full size.

I doubt most of the people who’ve found my blog realise the rotates.org history of pretty-but-useless splash pages. Essentially, the original purpose of this site was to display my current ‘cool thing’ that I’d created. It’s actually a huge passion of mine and great fun to knock something up in a few hours that looks really nice and is uncomplicated and pretty much pointless. I suppose that fits the bill of ‘art’ – thankfully I’m not so pretentious that I’d label it under that banner!

Anyway, after a major hiatus, I’ve created a new ‘splash page’ (for that is all that it is, and will likely ever be) for the online gaming clan I’ve been a member of for 10 years:

www.clan-sqs.com

Really, there’s nothing to discover, it’s exactly what you see. I’d love to have the patience and the skill to work on something akin to Windosill but alas it doesn’t slake my desire to see instant results. If you’d like to see some of my previous splash screens, you can view them here.

I hope you enjoy these little bits of my history – I’m hugely proud of all of them, and they serve to really show how I’ve come along in my profession as a web designer.

P.S. I’ve spent the night drinking Leffe Blonde and listening to Devin Townsend – Ziltoid the Omniscient – awesome 😀