That sucking sound you hear is Yahoo Pipes

So apparently Yahoo Pipes sucks.  It is really a very neat product and is very powerful, but reliability is apparently its Achilles heel.  I used it to set up the feed aggregator on the main page of danzimmermann.com and while I was learning about it I find that people have concerns of it's speed, downtime, and if it will just fade into nothingness.  This from the company that ditched its search engine to license Bing.  Confidence instilling, let me tell you.  So I am looking for a possible solution to aggregate two atom feeds, and if possible, tack on the author name as I have done on Pipes.  I had to manually run the pipe today to update the site, so that just won't do.