Threewords.me and displaying your words in an HTML document using YQL

Whilst I am still not quite sure why, I signed up for Threewords.me, a service where people can describe you in three words. My results range from expected over disturbing up to WTF, so that’s all good.

Now, threewords.me has no API as far as I can see and in the admin section there is a nice list of 10 most used words. To work around that I thought I use YQL - the statement is pretty easy:

select * from html where

url=”http://threewords.me/chrisheilmann” and

xpath=”//strong”

| unique(field=”strong”)

| sort(field=”yahoo:repeatcount”)

| reverse()

You can Try in console to see that it does what you ask it to – get the words, make them unique and sort them by frequency.

Add a dash of JavaScript and you have a list you can display in your pages:

You can see the script in action here or you can also get the source on GitHub.

Tags: hack, threewords.me, yql