This one’s from my Mashups class. The first project, was to build an RSS Reader. I’ve already posted a quick tutorial on how to build an RSS reader with Adobe Flex. Here’s a simple one that uses JQuery to get the feeds and then loop through them to output them to the browser window. Piece of cake for many of you, yes, but if you have never used anything but the DOM and plain ol’ JavaScript, you may be scared by the whole AJAX fad on teh intarwebs these days. JQuery makes it super easy to look like a Javascript rockstar. I teach a lot of students that haven’t ever touched a library of code like JQuery before, so tutorials like this are pretty valuable to some readers..
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A little over a year ago, I converted my then dormant domain, Mediadinosaur.com, into a gossip focused news aggregator (previously, it was a media/celeb focused community and blog). It now captures feeds from a number of high profile celebrity rags (Egostastic, TMZ, E!, WWTD, etc) and lets you get your fan fix in one centralized place. I built it in Flex to highlight the ease of use of the Framework and the power that the HTTPService and E4X gives you in getting and parsing XML. I’m using the site as an exercise for my Mashups and RIAs class as an introduction to developing with Flex and a easing into the concept of reading and using XML feeds and services for students that may have never used either of them. So let’s take a look at how this all comes together. (more…)

A few months ago, I was interviewed by a local TV station for a tech interest segment on mashups. I spoke with Tim McGinnis, the reporter featured in this clip and really had a good time. It was a short piece, but I still really enjoyed getting my couple minutes on the tube. My wife’s grandfather, (now 90!), saw me and immediately called her. The call went something like this:

Grandpa:“Chad’s on TV!”
Renee:“Yeah, we just saw that. Pretty cool, huh?”
Grandpa:“What the hell was he talking about?”
Renee:“I have no idea, either.”

I laughed.

About a week ago, I sent out a tweet asking for ideas on new APIs that might be worth checking out. You see, I am teaching a mashup course this fall and I need some new source material. I’ve played with Kuler, ColourLovers, Delicious, Yahoo Pipes, Technorati and a couple others (mostly unpublished and just experimental), but I just feel like I was missing something. I needed to check some other things out. Of course the new AS3 APIs for Google maps are out, so those are absolutely on my list, but I wanted some more “content rich” APIs. I spent some time on programmableweb.com (a great source for mashups and APIs) but only found a couple that struck my fancy enough to think about spending what is virtually my nonexistant free time on building a toy.

Rachael Rubin (wildhoney on twitter) was kind enough to point me to the newly revised Last.FM API and I think I will definitely use it at some point, but without a a proper link to the streaming music in their library, building a non playing audio based mashup seems a little less fun that it should be. It seems as though they intentionally make accessing the streams a little difficult to discourage bandwidth abuse.

All that changed today when I came across Govtrack.us on programmableweb. Wow. What a useful API. Fun? Not really… it’s an interface to the mountains of data generated by our Congressional representatives day to day business. Deep stuff. With the ever growing need for governmental transparency in this somewhat crazy time, it’s a fantastic resource to have. Generate clean XML based on what your reps are voting on, meeting about and talking over. Combine this with Google maps or perhaps any number of other rich data sources and you have some amazing potential to bring visibility to a very opaque world. Providing a new or easier to use interface to the insurmountable volumes of legislation might uncover some realizations that may have gone unnoticed otherwise.

I’m definitely going to give this one a spin. Shall we find something out from all of this? It remains to be seen, I guess. I have a few ideas on things I might like to track… how about you?

It’s no secret that I dig mashups. There is a particularly cool one that popped up recently called Wordle. It generates a word-art style tag cloud from a collection of text, an RSS feed or uses your Del.icio.us bookmarks tags. A very nice packing algorithm and some good color and typography customization options make the end results pretty aesthetically pleasing. Using my web design bookmarks (used very often as a teaching resource for my students), produced this masterpiece:

You should go check the site out. A pretty good selection of creations is popping up over there. I’m not sure about the actual construction of the piece, but due to it being a Java Applet, I’m guessing it was built with Processing.

Many thanks to Darius and everyone at ColourLovers for making a great, easy to use API, also thanks to Juan Sanchez and the Degrafa team for making Degrafa the best way to draw in Flex. The DekafLovers mashup is currently featured at programmableweb.com as the mashup of the day and they have a nice writeup of it here. This mashup uses a similar codebase to Cooler Kreator, but uses the ColourLovers API instead of Kuler.

It’s great to get people making these patterns, I love seeing the stuff it produces.