ChrisDevBox

So, I’m researching video comments… I ran into Riffly.  They happen to have a plugin for Wordpress.  The only drawback is that little ad at the bottom and the super pixelated output… but is FREE, so who cares. 

TO test, please add a comment.  

http://riffly.com/

Since the creation and launch of Wikipedia back in 2001 many people from all over the world have been busy collaborating, adding and updating content on this very popular wiki web.

The wiki concept started a long time ago back in the early 1990’s, nevertheless, Wikipedia, even though it hasn’t been around too long, it is by far the biggest and most active wiki on the web.

The amount of valuable data that has been accumulating on Wikipedia is already in the millions. The biggest challenge now is making all of that data relevant and meaningful to users exploring and searching for information.

Most people arrive into Wikipedia via Google… for example, if you do a quick google search on pretty much anything you’ll most likely get Wikipedia at the very top of the search results. That’s due to Wikipedia’s huge link popularity and page ranking (Different topic).

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This is a cool little utility I created after getting more than a few requests from friends and family asking me: How can I download the YouTube FLV video, so I can use it in my “school” project… (Notice the quotes around school?).  Anyway, what you do with the video is up to you, just don’t do anything illegal like starting your own YouTube video site using videos from YouTube!  Here is the link to the download utility

http://www.chrisdevbox.com/tools/get_youtube_video_download.php

Enjoy, and leave a comment if you like it!

The term API (Application Programming Interface) is typically used for when referring to a set of methods that are publicly exposed in order to interact/communicate with another application. Let’s say you write a web application that you would like other people to extend and add more features to. In order to do that you create an API…

Here is an example of a very popular “WEB” API: http://apidoc.digg.com/

Digg created a set of public web methods that are accessible via HTTP (hence why I call them “web” methods) and that allowed me to create my own little app on my server that displays Digg data. Now all APIs are different and their is no standard naming convention that I know of.

Google has them as well http://code.google.com/. When you integrate with external API you call that a mashup. I created my own Google maps mashup and you can see it here

Here is another more in-depth example:

Let’s say you have a contacts database and you would like to expose that via an API. Here are the steps you would need to take. Assuming that you are not a programmer I’m going to keep this light.

1. Write a new page using your programming language (Perl, C#, PHP, Python, Rubi, etc) that talks to your contacts database and call it api.php (Will use PHP for this example)
2. Create a method inside your page that will return contact info and call it GetContacInfoByName(string name).
3. Write the necessary code to take a parameter and call that function, so let’s say if I wanted to invoke the GetContactInfoByName method I need to use <domain>/api.php?invoke=GetContactInfoByName&name=Chris This URL contains two parameters “invoke” and “name”. Invoke is used for selecting the method you wish to trigger and name is used for retrieving the data.

I wrote a page on my wiki and created a some code examples for the client/API and the response. Client being the API.