This is the basic structure of a data call to Yahoo Maps’ API. This will draw a 500px by 300px map centered on Wired’s San Francisco offices, complete with zoom and pan controls. When the user clicks on the location marker, a pop-up box will appear with some text inside.
All of these attributes can be changed by modifying the code below. You’ll need to use your own API key.
Yahoo’s Maps API may not be as popular as Google’s mashup mainstay, but it has many of the same features. In some ways, it’s even easier to use than Google’s Maps API, so beginners getting started with API interaction might prefer Yahoo’s implementation.
To get started working with Yahoo maps, we’ll simply create a map we can display on a web page, and then add a marker to denote a particular location.
Since the major search engines have opened up their mapping tools to programmers, geocoding has become an essential step in the process of building many a mashup.
Geocoding is the process of converting human-readable place data — a city name, ZIP code, or address — to latitude and longitude points that can be easily plotted on a map.
Yahoo’s HTTP Geocoder API is easy to use, and its output is easy to incorporate into your applications. This article will describe its features and show some examples of how to access the results.
Continue Reading “Get Started With the Yahoo HTTP Geocoder API” »
Online maps are a popular way to spice up a site. To get the most use out of them, you need data to plot: addresses from a database, location clicks from the user or at least coordinates for the map’s center. With any map, you have to start somewhere.
If you’re low on data, you can fill in the map with local listings, such as those you’d find in the Yellow Pages. You can show coffee shops or pizza joints right along your other data, or even on its own.
In this tutorial I’ll show how to use Yahoo Local to search for nearby businesses and landmarks, then plot those locations on a Yahoo Map using the Ajax API.
Continue Reading “Get Local Search Results From Yahoo” »
Earlier this month, Craigslist blocked Yahoo Pipes from accessing any Craigslist page. As a result, mashups all over the web were suddenly without data.
After not responding to inquires, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster eventually posted a terse message on the company’s blog saying that Yahoo Pipes mashups were using “a disproportionate amount of server/bandwidth resources.”Now it would seem that Craigslist has ended its ban of Yahoo Pipes, but for developers we imagine the damage has been done. For its part, the startup Flippity, which was the first to notice its Yahoo Pipe had been blocked, says it has moved on to friendlier sources, rewriting Flippity to use the eBay API.
It wasn’t the first time Craigslist has shutdown outsiders trying to improve on the site’s famously antiquated tools — the site previous blocked ListPic, a tool designed to help Craigslist users browse by images, and a tool to search all the Craigslist sites at once.
As we said in our initial report on this debacle, if you’re a developer looking for data to use in a mashup, think twice about Craigslist. The site has a wealth of data, but it guards it jealously and has no qualms about blocking even major players like Yahoo.
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