Advanced CSS Design Resources - last-child.com » XML

Great job opening for senior web devs

Ted — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 18:43:06 +0000

posted: June 19, 2007

If you like to travel, work on many different projects, and make a difference to millions of web viewers… I’ve got the job opening for you.

Skills required

You’ve worked with web applications before
You are solid with HTML, CSS, Semantic Markup, and JavaScript
Knowledge of XML, XSL, PHP
Ability to work with people, strong communication, and passion about the web industry

This is an interesting job and you’ll certainly be challenged. The team is filled with brilliant programmers and are making an impact on the web.

Send resumes and sample web sites to me directly Ted@tdrake.net and I will pass them on to the right person. You can get more information and submit your resume here: Senior Front End Engineer, Yahoo! MediaSuite

Aggregate RSS from all over the web with Yahoo! Pipes

Ted — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 17:19:26 +0000

Yahoo! has been thriving on hacks. It’s quarterly Hack Days have given engineers the opportunity to build radical and sometimes silly alterations of existing services. Once in a while, these hacks are truly revolutionary. Enter Yahoo! Pipes.

This super cool project started as a Hack and has now become an official project. How cool is it? Think of the impact Digg, Flickr, Delicious, Technorati, and YouTube had on the internet in 2006. Pipes has that potential!

So, what is this potential “Segway” product? Pipes allows you to create aggregated feeds to publish on your own site.

Lets say you wanted to create a web page about Pizza in someone’s local area. B.P. (Before Pipes) you would have to write code for a form requesting a zip code, you’d then have to write code to request the appropriate rss feed from Yahoo! Local for restaurants, Epicurious for recipes, Craigslist for pizza loving personal ads, Flickr for images of pizza, etc. You’d then have to parse the XML and build modules to display the information.

That’s a lot of work for a simple project.

Enter the Pipe

Pipes allows you to do all of this in a simple drag and drop interface. I first used it in its early Alpha stage and it took me about 10 minutes to figure out what was happening. They’ve steadily worked on the interface and you can accomplish the above tasks in about 5 minutes. You can then use their tools to publish the results to your own blog or web site.

Mashing up has now become easier than opening a box of potato flakes and adding water. This is big folks, really big.

Here’s how the Pipes team describes their goal

Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.
pipes.yahoo.com

It ain’t perfect… yet

Pipes does have some rough edges, there’s no doubt about it. It’s not very accessible, but they’re working on that right now. If you have suggestions or find bugs, let them know.

Enjoy this site as the super-cool, revolutionary site it is. It’s was created with passion and hard work by a small devoted team. They’ve got the spirit of a startup with the power of Yahoo!

Enjoy the new A.P. Era (After Pipes).

Add OpenSearch to your web site

Ted — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 03:15:12 +0000

Chris Wilson, the main guy behind IE7 (and older versions) discussed several new features of Internet Explorer 7 at the @media conference in London. One feature in particular that stood out for me was the OpenSearch protocol. Adding this to your site can be easy, it can also be a headache.

What is OpenSearch?

OpenSearch was developed by Amazon’s A9 search engine to enable aggregators to easily acquire content and make more robust search result pages. Internet Explorer 7 is using this protocol to give users the ability to search a site via the integrated search box. It’s a two step process: create an XML document that defines your site’s search engine methods and then place a link to that XML in your page header. It sounds simple enough lets see it in action and then learn how to build the XML document.

Using OpenSearch

Yahoo! Tech recently added OpenSearch. If you have Internet Explorer 7 on your computer, you can enjoy the OpenSearch experience right away. If you don’t have IE7 yet, download it now!

Internet Explorer 7 has a built in search box in the top right of the page. If you have added OpenSearch to your site you will notice the box has an orange down arrow. Clicking on this arrow will expose a new menu. You can now search this site via the box and add the site to your favorite search engines.

If your site offers search results in RSS or Atom format, you’ll get enhanced functionality in your search results. Yahoo! Tech only features HTML results, so we give you the option of using the built in search box.

At this point you may be saying… Is that all there is? Well, yes. With a little bit of work, you are giving your visitors the ability to search from the built in search box and you are making it easier for A9 and other search engines to spider your content and surface your site in their results. Let’s look at how easy it is to implement.

The OpenSearch XML

The XML document is fairly simple, you define the site’s name, description, attributions, favicon, and other simple elements. The important element is the Url. This is where you define the location of your search engine and the parameter passed to define the query.

On Yahoo! Tech, the search page is tech.yahoo.com/sp and the query is passed as prod=search+term. The OpenSearch XML expects you to use this specific markup {searchTerms} where you want the engine or IE7 search box to insert the query terms. Further, I found it much easier to write the url as a whole string, rather than setting the prod parameter as a sub-element. You can also allow the search engines to narrow the results by number {count} and more.

Let’s look at the XML in depth.

Start off the xml file with the standard opening. We then open the OpenSearchDescription element. There is a link to a9.com to define the namespace.

Yahoo! Tech Search for the best gadgets and how to use your tech gear on Yahoo! Tech