Geeks: Getting photos from 23 via JavaScript
It’s Friday afternoon and it’s time to relax. And what’s better than playing around with some nice JavaScript code on an evening of?
This week Google launched a new service called Google AJAX Feed API, which allows you to download any public Atom or RSS feed using only JavaScript. Google handles all the complexity of retrieving and parsing the data for you.
This means that you can take any feed from 23 and add a few lines of code to your web page to show the photos from the feed in any manner you see fit. (In fact, you could already do this by getting data directly from 23, but that’s hardly the point right now…)
An example: A neat slideshow of photos tagged 23, loaded through the feed API.
This is were you say: Hm, I can already do that with 23. Why bother? I cooked another example to demonstrate a badge of four recent comments to your photos, which utilizes an rss feed with content not ordinarily available through badge form.
Please note: The code in these example is particularly dreadful — it’s only quick and dirty demo after all. We’re discussing if it would make sense to add a little extra information to the rss feed (a is the case on filicio.us for example). Let us know if you have a great idea for a feature to pursue in this manner…