townx

As I've mentioned before, I'm doing a presentation on Web 2.0 in a couple of weeks, at OpenAdvantage. Obviously, I want to talk about AJAX and mashups; but rather than talk generally, I thought an example built using open source would be good. It would also give me a better idea of how easy it is to use some of the available APIs. So on Friday I spent about 4 hours learning enough of the Google Maps API to create a clickable maps of places important to me and my family; then tied this to the Flickr API, which I'm already familiar with, to display images from the clicked location. Hey presto, a mashup. Not particularly inspired, but it demonstrates AJAX nicely, plus the use of APIs, and that all-important mashup.

On the day, I plan to use a local version of this; but I also put it up on the web at http://mmm.receptacular.org as a more general demo. Before anyone points it out to me, the word "mechanical" is misplaced as there's nothing mechanical about it; I was just thinking of Bagpuss at the time. Just to make it extra Web 2.0, I also wrote it using Ruby on Rails.