You inspire me too!

I decided to re-examine the template, layout and style options for my blog, as everybody this week seems to be getting a new cyber-look! I perused the available templates, but I quite like this green version of the tick tack template that I currently have. Instead, I changed some of the font colours of the headings and post titles. It's a subtle change, but it adds a little colour where there was grey.

A bit of a shout-out of appreciation: thanks for always sharing your ideas, tips and strategies for getting through both the content and the blog set-up of this course. It's been invaluable to me and I appreciate that everyone is always so open-minded and helpful. Almost a shame that this assignment will be over soon...well, maybe :-)

Trouble using delicious browser buttons

I know it's off the topic for this week, but I was wondering if anyone had any advice for me in regards to my trouble using delicious. I (finally) got access to broadband from home. Yay! But, I have been trying to save bookmarks using the tag icon on the internet explorer toolbar I downloaded from delicious and it keeps needing me to type in my password and log in each time. I don't mean to be showing techno-rage here, but it has the temerity to display on the screen 'saving bookmarks would be much easier with delicious browser icons'!!!

Please let me know how you would go about sovling this problem. I have even tried downloading the toolbar again. No change.

Thanks.

Mashups: Helpful videos and a mashup I use

I found two YouTube videos which helped me to further understand what mashups and APIs are: the first has a lot of technical language (which went a bit over my head) but it illustrates how the people who use APIs for data exchange with other sites (like Amazon.com and YouTube) can use this to make money from people who use these applications (e.g. a search) through their site.



The second video is from YouTube itself, and shows the viewer how to create data and player APIs on your website. It turns out that the video bar added to my site is a type of data API! Another type of data API would be having a search function for YouTube videos on your site, or a way to upload data from your site to YouTube. I used the player API function to make the ‘skin’ of the player match the green colour scheme of my blog.



According to Programmable Web I already use a mashup in the form of my Facebook profile. This mashup has become very useful to me because I can link to my favourite YouTube videos through the ‘box’ I recently created on my profile, and I am discovering many other ways to add data to my profile from external sources. The Programmable Web article http://www.programmableweb.com/api/facebook/mashups has a list of the applications available through Facebook which can be added on to your profile page, and thus create a mashup. I searched through the applications available from my own account on Facebook and even found one called ‘flickr2facebook’ which is a bookmarklet that can add a Flickr photo straight into your Facebook album. I think that mashups are valuable tools for web users because it makes data available to access in one place, even if the data is from multiple sources.

Mashups… another unknown

I did find the articles about mashups to be very technical, but my basic understanding is that a mashup is a website that draws on lots of different types of web content (e.g. pictures from Flickr or videos from YouTube, etc). These require APIs, which are Application Programming Interfaces that are “a set of functions that can be called from an application program to access features of another program” (http://www.gravityfree.com/resources/glossary.cfm). From reading the articles on Blackboard, I would agree that APIs are complicated and require a high degree of technical knowledge to work with. When trying to find some examples of APIs that I could relate to, I discovered the Twitter API is one of the most popular APIs used on the web today. Here is the link to the Programmable Web article on this topic. It includes some information on the latest Twitter applications – you’d appreciate this Amy! Check out Cursebird: Real-time feed of people swearing on Twitter.

http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/02/19/120-twitter-mashups-and-growing-fast/

Apparently social networking sites have led to the development of interesting mashups because people integrate pictures, videos and RSS feeds (among other data sources) into their personal pages. Do you think this shows that people are creating mashups almost without thinking about it, as sites are providing ways of doing this without needing expertise?

I took a look at http://www.gurulib.com/, but I could only gain access to the small portion of public data (without having created an account). It has images of book covers, ads/links to Amzon.com to buy books, links to ‘read a sample’ of a particular book as an e-book, as well as profile pages for members with links to Facebook applications, etc. I am unsure how to figure out ‘where the data is coming from’ as this week’s task asks. But, I would say that integrating the (above) listed data from external sites makes it a mashup. What do you think?

Going further with Google Maps

I went to this Google Maps help site because I wanted to know how to add pictures into my placemarker description. I then typed in the following instruction in HTML language, I was so proud of myself! I actually applied what we learnt in this week’s tutorial, and it worked. (PS: I included the actual command here, but clicking 'publish post' meant that it turned into the actual picture - even though I wrote the command in 'compose' view).



I added pictures of the destinations onto Zagreb, Paris, Niagra Falls (Canada) and Las Vegas. I also experimented with the order of height and width in the HTML language, and discovered that it does not work if you put height before width. Strange, order really is important. I liked the freedom of being able to decide with a few key strokes how big the pictures would appear.

I also found out how to embed a YouTube video into a placemark description. You are meant to paste the 'embed' link into the Edit HTML part of the description box. However, I did this in the Miami description box and it the video kept disappearing when I would try to go out and view the map again (even though I saved it and everything). I have added the URL into the rich text on my map, so you can paste it into your browser and view The Golden Girls clip. If anyone finds out how to embed a video and make it stay there, please let me know.

My Dream holiday desti­natio­ns! map is embedded below. Fingers crossed it will stay there!

View Larger Map

The link to the URL of my map is this http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=100839570829396594239.0004668831d927f190d1e&z=2, in case you can't quite click on everything in the embedded map.

Problem solving with the Google Maps task

Ahh, I found out how to get the icons for markers and lines back! It turns out that you have to be in edit mode in order to do anything. It seems simple enough…now.

It also turns out that you just have to be in edit mode in order to drag your placemarks around, too! I feel a little daft, but I’m learning!

I keep, though, encountering problems when I try to draw a line. It keeps ‘grabbing’ my map with the hand and not drawing anything, even thought I have clearly selected this option and the screen is displaying the prompt ‘click to draw a line’.

I did, however, find an easier way to placemark destinations. I searched the name of places, such as Paris in France and then clicked on the option ‘save to my maps’ and this placemark (now) accurately shows the location of this city on my map.

Taking a look at the Google Maps task

I was a bit overwhelmed by this week’s task, as I have only perused Google Maps twice (ever!) and one of those times was in our other course this semester. So, understandably I was daunted. I fount the tutorials on the Google Maps site to be quite helpful, even if they were not entirely related to what we are doing this week, I certainly found them to be comforting.

I changed the Privacy and Sharing settings from public to private, as I would prefer to keep this map between me and people who read my blog (not the whole world). I am glad that Google always gives 'privacy setting' options is easily accessible places, as this enables users to customise the features of their applications (be it blogger or maps, etc).

I found a small ‘box’ in the lower right hand corner of my Google map screen, and this helped me to change the location being displayed from Australia to Europe for my first lot of placemarkers. I was able to place a marker in Croatia, but it did not zoom in like it does on places in Victoria. I could only find a way to placemark the entire country, and then write the places I would visit in the position description. This would not be helpful if I was actually trying to plan a route on a real holiday. I am frustrated. I wonder why this happened. If anyone finds a different way to do this, please let me know. Now the locations are showing up. This is after I refreshed and logged in again. However, I am wondering how to move a placemarker I have set. Now the Croatia one seems to be in the wrong place. Oh well, it is kind of close to Zagreb! I will try to place them more accurately from now on. Now my icons for drawing lines and creating placemarkers seem to have disappeared!

I will come back and attempt this later. Arrggh!