Someone just came to our table at Mashed08 and asked if Yahoo! offers a currency conversion API. We don’t, but a few lines of PHP allows you to get the information from the Yahoo finance site: function convert($from,$to){ $url= ‘http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?amt=1&from=’.$from.’&to=’.$to.’&submit=Convert’; $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); $feed = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); preg_match_all(“/tabledata1”>([^

I just read another amazing novel by Douglas Coupland on my 5 hour flight to Ankara called “Eleanor Rigby”. This is a quote I really enjoyed: Jeremy asked if I liked my job. “I think big companies are like marching bands. You know the big secret about marching bands, don’t you?” “No, what is it?” […]

As several people asked how I did the easier Flickr interface, I wrote up some step-by-step instructions, analyzing the issues and then taking the API to work around them. Check out How to create an alternative Flickr interface – step by step. This is one example where providing a good API can empower developers to […]

Following the accessibility hack of YouTube I thought the same could be done for Flickr, and here it is: Easy Flickr is a very basic interface to look for photos and click through them 20 at a time. It works with and without JavaScript. Update: It seems there is some confusion as to how this […]

Warning: The YouTube API is flaky at the moment, so there might be some outages! At this year’s Accessibility2.0 conference in London Antonia Hyde from United Response asked the audience for technological solutions to make the social web easier accessible for people with learning disabilities. Her presentation Rich Media and web apps for people with […]