It is great if a company offers their data to developers to use on their own sites. It is even better when it is pretty painless to embed this data into your own products. Nearly all of the Yahoo! services also offer a REST API to use results of searches in your own web sites – the difference to a lot of other services is that you could also have the data in JSON format rather than XML.

What this means? You don’t really need any Ajax trickery to use the data, a simple SCRIPT tag is enough.

Find out more about Embedded Dynamic Web Search Forms with JSON

This will probably be a first in a series of tips and tricks with the Y! APIs.

Dude, check this out

This does not throw a syntax error. First one to see through my crazy trick can take a cookie from the jar in the kitchen!

The cookie goes to Matthew (check the comments).

Explanation: You can set labels in JavaScript (as explained in an earlier post) by adding a colon to a name, and all a URL does is create a label with the name ‘http’. As the double slash is following the colon, the JavaScript interpreter only recognises a label followed by a comment.

Gabbly is a really interesting approach to the issue that you need to discuss designs with clients and peers. It is a chat panel that appears on any page (except for those that redirect the user) when you add the URL as a parameter, for example

http://www.gabbly.com/www.wait-till-i.com

It is a matter of time before there will be some legal issues with that (libel and all that), but is a really nice idea!

You’ve read enough of my stuff, now it is time to see and hear me talk (if you are able to do both). This means not only will you be able to listen to some stuff I have to say, no, you can even ask questions and shout at me without risking comment moderation.

Stuart Colville of Muffinresearch has organised the first Web Standards Group London Meetup and I was asked to give a presentation on “something about modern JavaScript”. He also asked Andy Budd to talk about “something about CSS and web standards”.

Hence I pondered and came up with the idea to hold a concept/idea/tips and tricks session about “Maintainable JavaScript”. This means I’ll talk about how to create JavaScript that will not come back to you for maintenance but make it easy for colleagues, clients and other third parties to change the look and feel and even the content of your scripting solutions.

In any case, it’ll be an interesting evening and there’ll be book giveaways (with mine being released 3 days after the event) and drinks to make you forget what Andy and me talked about. So go to the site, sign up and I’ll see you on the 14th of July in London’s beautiful north (I can take a bus home, or cycle!).

Update: The performance was great and I met Henry outside later on for a quick chat. He really is as down to earth as you’d expect. The venue, however, was a joke: Boiling hot and there was no space for your feet (on the most expensive seats).

I am always amazed how hard some web sites make it for you to order a ticket for a show. This Sunday, Henry Rollins is performing at the Hackney Empire in my neck of the woods (I found out by pure chance, seeing a small flyer on a bus-stop). Now, I go to the Hackney Empire web site and get a splash page with an enter button before reaching a nice looking flash interface (what is the use of the splash page?).

I need to select the genre from the menu on the left which is OK enough – although having the current month as the first option would be a nice touch – what is the point of checking shows in the past?

I select Comedy and sure enough Henry pops up. If he hadn’t been the first to show up I’d have to use a flash scroll bar on the right to scroll down. Below the show’s photo are two links (with pointing hands to the right of them): “More info” and “How to book”. I click “How to book” as I do want to book, and get a panel sliding up from below offering me the obvious choices to book “In person or by phone”, “per post” first. Hello? I am online! The next choice is “online booking” which tells me to “Simply click on the show you wish to buy ticket for and follow the instructions on screen.”
In short, clicking the “how to book” link this was a pointless exercise – unless you don’t want to book offline.

I get rid of the panel via the “close this window” (what window?) link and get back to the show to try to “click on the show you wish to buy a ticket for”, but neither the photo of Henry nor the title of the show is linked. Instead, I have to click the “more info” link, which pops up a panel with exactly the same information as the listing and a massive “book here” button.

Clicking this button opens a new browser window listing all shows playing at the Empire at the moment with only a “buy tickets” link in the last column of the table row to buy them. There I have to find the show again and I can finally purchase tickets – in a pretty straight forward interface though.

Now I wonder if Hackney Empire is being paid by clicks on their web site or why there is no “purchase tickets online” link on the first listing?