Action Pants

So I am working on a project that involves making a Sharepoint WebPart. I have the functionality down but it looks like crap. Now I could bug someone to help me make it look pretty, but I think I am going to bite the bullet and figure out this whole CSS thing. I keep doing projects that work, but look horrible and it's got to stop. On a side note Bamboo Solutions makes really good stuff from what i can tell. I had to find a way to get data from a SQL Database into sharepoint and they have from what can tell the only solution to do this. Access 2007 has a feature built into but I found it too be very memory intensive with large sets of data. I don't normally push a product unless I like it, so yea if you need to get data into sharepoint, they would be the way to go.

So in my never ending quest to keep up with today's technology I was playing around with Yahoo Pipes today. It's a pretty awesome idea for managing sources of data on the web. This flashed based app allows you to take different sources and then pro grammatically run operations against the data. After you've done your thing you can publish your creation to share with others. I read an article on how to use it to build complex query's to find listings on Craigslist which I found to be very handy. With all the features it offers and it's ease of use, I can see this little tool of Yahoo's going quite far. Be sure to check it out if you get a chance.