Jun 21 2009

“What Exactly is a ‘Mashup’?”

clipped from netforbeginners.about.com

You hear this “mashup” expression being used by techie friends of yours. They talk about “oh, that is such an awesome mashup”. But what exactly does “mashup” mean?

“Mashup” comes from the term “mashed potatoes”, but is much more sophisticated. A “mashup” combines services from different websites into a single website. The intent is to give exceptional customer service to the reader by combining the best of two or more online software products.
Mashups are not new, by any means. The idea of combining multiple software API services (“application programming interfaces”) is decades old. In fact, your Microsoft Windows operating system is a perfect everyday example of mashup programming. But in the last few years, web site mashups have become a serious business for web programmers.

May 30 2009

Google’s Zip Code Lookup

zipcode_check1

So, I was using one of Google’s sign up forms, and I noticed that it gave me a nice tip – The valid zip codes for my state! Along with some sample zip codes for my country (usa). I opened up the firebug console and checked out the ajax call – it was this: https://www.google.com/adsense/addrform/resources?kind=country&code=US

That’s really cool. It returned an XML document with all the state’s valid zipcodes. While it may be unreliable to make this same AJAX call from within your own web application every time, the XML document itself is quite valuable with the zip code validation.

Download that XML document here.

zipcode_check2


May 28 2009

I <3 API’s

Tinyurl has an API

Wednesday, June 27, 2007 by Dave Winer.

Of course I’d like to do what Twitter does, and generate a Tinyurl in place of a longish URL for each TwitterGram. I had assumed all along that Twitter had a special deal with the TInyurl folks, but apparently not so. They have an open API that is simplicity itself. It’s so simple it’s almost hard to describe. Permalink to this paragraph

Try clicking on this link:  Permalink to this paragraph

http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=http://scripting.com/ Permalink to this paragraph

It returns a Tinyurl. Copy it to the clipboard, and paste it into the address bar of your browser. it should take you to the home page of my weblog. Apparently it works for any URL you give it. And of course you can call it from a script just as easily as you click a link in a browser. Very nice! Permalink to this paragraph