Earlier this week I blogged about MashupCrowd.com and MashupSpy.com, but I still have some other mashup .com domains that I am not sure what I should do with. They are:
I am not sure what to do with them, but I think they all have potential. Especially I love MashupCookbook.com. Unfourtunatly I do not really have an idea that is good enough (read: fun + making money) yet. Do anyone smarter than me have an idea?
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n \n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n \n
\n
\n \n
\n
I have played around with Googles Custom Search Engines earlier, but now I have finally used it in a live site and it turned out quite well. On MashupSpy.com I have set up a Custom Search engine that emphazises my favourite sites about mashups – in this I have included sites about Enterprise Mashups (gartner.com), sites with lots of usefull APIs (code.google.com), sites with great tutorials (developer.yahoo.com) and sites with great mashup insipirations (programmableweb.com). See the full list of sites on mashupspy.com.
Configuring the Search Engine in Googles control panel, adding sites etc is a walk in the park. Integrating a Custom Search Engine into the site was a bit tricky though, the documentation is far from perfect. The trick is to host the search results on your own site in an iframe (set in the Custom Search Engine control panel under “code”) and knowing that this iframe is generated by Google’s javascript when it is time to show the search result. For a while I was unsuccessfull in styling things since I tried to create my own iframe, but there is no need to complicate things like that. Also good to know is that running a Custom Search Engine locally works so-so, I got a lot of “The URI you submitted has disallowed characters.” error messages when running from localhost, but things worked perfectly once I uploaded it to the production server.
For the time it took (hours, mostly spent on learning the magics of CSS) it is an impressive functionality on MashupSpy, I will definitly use Custom Search Engines more in the future. If you have ideas on how I can improve MashupSpy or if I have missed any sites (see the full list on mashupspy.com) in my Custom Search Engine then please let me know!
\n
\n
\n
\n \n
\n
The other day I launched MashupCrowd.com. It is a page that tracks who is talking about mashups on Twitter. I have been sitting on mashupcrowd.com and some other mashup .com domains for almost a year now, so it was about time to do something with (at least a few of) them. Inspired by svpt.nu – a very cool site that tracks Swedish Twitter users – I figured that I could do something similar but for mashups. That also gave me an excuse to finally dig into the Twitter API.
It was extremely easy to get the interaction with Twitter to work using Twitters super simple Search API. As a basis for my PHP code I used Simon Maddox’s Codeigniter Twitter library to speed up development even more. Basically the backend is nothing more than a cron job pinging Twitters Search API every few minutes for new tweets and then saving them in a database. Considering doing something more with this data at a later stage, but for now I just show it on the site. What took the most time was not figuring out how to use the Twitter API or to write the few lines of PHP needed. What took me time was to get the site to look good using CSS, but I am quite happy with the end result. Hopefully I can do some more of my own CSS work in the future.
MashupCrowd has already proved usefull for me in finding new innovative mashups. Today I found a cool use of Twitter to track the snow depth in the UK.