CNET is not one of them

Okay so here we are at the end of the semester and still struggling with the API's and thier annoying documentation. You are lucky if you get the right information at the right time to do the coding for your project. The most difficult part is to understand the API documentation because either they have loads of information to bombard at you or they have nothing to offer accept API service.

So the new problem is that apparently CNET api's cool cool dashboard is not working. What I was thinking of doing was to show reviews of play stations and etc from CNET's Games And Gear category. Now the next step is that you need a category ID to call their web service for this particular category.

Now I looked into the documentation and they have ID's specified only for some of the most popular categories used by the developers but not all of them. It is quite surprising that nobody used their category of games and gear but mp3 players and televisions etc. So next thing I did was to go to forum to check if somebody else was facing the same problem. And there was solution to my problem ...there was the URL i could use which gives xml response with all the category ID's in it which you can see if you know how to read XML.
That URL worked and did gave a xml response but it didn't had games and gear as a category in it and I don't know why? And it is also not a child category. So now I gave up on CNET and started doing ebay which now seems better option to me. :-(
Here's the link to the page which shows the request URL which gives the category ID's for CNET...Click

Update...Update....Update

So here we all are at the end of the semester....and the only class I am worrying about is IS 449. I am lagging behind in the blog part of the class and I even forgot about the responses to other blogs. Well I tell you that blogging isn't a easy thing to do. If I really want to make a sensible response to a blog....I really have to read it carefully.

Individual Project has been pretty good so far. Using different API's at the same time is not a piece of cake. Well for my individual project I think I have been using a lot of yelp. They had the easy-to-understand documentation and examples. I think that I have been lacking on using creativity with AJAX so far.

Coding doesn't really change that much with Ajax but what is interesting is how you can bring a major difference in your web applications using small piece of code. Update on the group project , Initially I worked with the Yelp neighbourhood API and Google maps to complete Iteration 2. Now I am working on CNET api for the final group iteration. I think I will stick with PHP proxy because I find it easy to use. My rest of the group members are thinking of putting youtube in it. We ll see how it turns out.