Iteration 3: Continuing to pull my hair

I really wanted my iteration 2 program to work and after hours and much frustration, I decided to give up. I started over and listened to some advice from Chris. He told me to use Google's API to create a site and it's a lot easier than what I was doing. I got the Google key and then continued on to create my site. My site switches blogs at the click of a button. The biggest issue I had was within my PHP file. Every time I tried to run the program, an alert box would come up saying "undefined". I have no clue what that means but that's what it said. No matter what i tried I got the same alert box or no results but no alert box. I am so happy that Chris helped me. If I have learned anything from these iterations it is that I HATE programming.

But when I was in John's office he told me about a cool site that I wished would have helped me more than it did. The site is pipes.yahoo.com. It pretty cool. It is supposed to help create mashups for the people that are not the best programmers but need to get things done. I found the site to be pretty interesting. It can filter contents and do a lot of other stuff.


One of the students from last semester blogged about it and she liked it. If I get more time I am going to try and create my own little mashup and then publish it so that can be searched and people can use it. It might even inspire someone else

Getting a Yahoo Pipes Badge

Continuing along the Yahoo Pipes topic, a question was raised as to how to publish a pipe on a website. Based on the documentation for the website I learned this can be accomplished with the help of a Pipes Badge. As stated in the documentation, "A Yahoo! Pipes badge allows you to have Pipes generated content on your blog, website, or social network".

There are three types of badges; a list badge, an image badge, and a map badge. The list badge is used for a simple list of items, description fields, and thumbnails. An image badge shows images present on a feed, displays images as a thumbnail, and description field if one is available. The third badge type is a map badge. If geocoding is available a dragable map is displayed with pin points.

To get a badge all that is required is to open a pipe by logging into yahoo.com and visiting pipes.yahoo.com. Next click the "Get as a badge" wizard seen on the pipe.

Next, select where the badge will be placed. If it's a basic web page select Embed.

Finally, you are presented with the javascript to use on the page which can be copied/pasted into your html file.

Here's how the pipe I created appears on a web page:

Once a pipe is created it's quite simple to integrate it into a web site. I thought this would be much more complicated than it was but after reviewing the documentation and trying it out myself I discovered it's super easy!