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| Proto Mashup: Craigslist, Yahoo! Pipes & Maps, and Email |
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http://www.protosw.com/mods/app/view/379
Here's a full screen version:
http://www.protosw.com/products/movies
This Proto mashup brings Craigslist, Yahoo!
Pipes, Yahoo! Maps, and Microsoft Outlook
together into one sweet apartment hunting and
tracking mashup app.
First, I built a rich RSS feed using Yahoo!
Pipes to query Craigslist in New York City
for apartment listings (all brokers / fees
too). The Yahoo! Pipe feed adds on (this
functionality rocks) a Latitude / Longitude
geo-coding if it can find anything that looks
like an address in any of the fields in the
RSS feed, in our case apartment listings. So
I build a URL for CL with the right
parameters to hit newyork.craigslist.com with
apartment search terms, the listing offset
(page in increments of 25), and how many
bedrooms. For example:
http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/aap?bedr
ooms=1&...
Then using Yahoo! Pipes, we can build this
URL with some simple inputs for query,
bedrooms, and "s" (start offset). Pipes will
output the new feed with only listings for
which it can determine some lat/lon
coordinates with reasonable probability. The
Yahoo! Pipe outputs a REST interface like so:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/tiEOFaG42xGAp2fe
ZYQMOQ/...
Step 2: Using Proto, query the Yahoo! Pipes
REST API a number of times with multiple
search phrases. For example, get the first 4
pages (100) results for each of
"williamsburg", "les", and "lower east side".
Then Proto groups these all back together
into a single feed for further display,
storage, and analysis. This is nice since the
Yahoo! Pipe service will usually only return
about 25% of the results with legitimate
geocoding. I built the multiple REST queries
and aggregation functionality
sort of like the deep search example.
Step 3: Show all the listing results on a
Yahoo! map. This makes it super easy to focus
in on a certain neighborhood and ignore the
"Williamsburg" listings that are past queens.
Try it out... The map is shown using Adobe
Flash right in Proto.
Then you decide what to do:
1. Eliminate / blacklist listings you never
want to see again.
2. Save listings with additional info like:
Broker email, Broker phone, Broker Name,
Comments, Rent, Other Monthly costs, Lease
Term, broker fee, etc.
3. Analyze all your 'saved' listings to
calculate the total, all in monthly rent by
adding up all the costs and averaging out the
broker's fee. Roommates are included into the
monthly bill split.
4. If you need to light a fire because you're
the one actually driving the apartment search
since your lease is up in 2 weeks and your
slacker friends are doing nothign about it,
grab a screenshot of the apartments you've
found and send it via Outlook. To do this,
Proto uses VBA to create a new Email message
and then uses the VBA "SendKeys" to paste in
the screenshot you take of the Yahoo! Map
(taken right in Proto wiht the movie /
screencap module).
That's it. you have a full featured applic...
er, mashup to help you find some new digs in
NYC. Feel free to redirect the Pipes REST
request to another city or search for that
matter. I tried it out with "Free Stuff", but
there's way less meaningful results. For sale
items could work though... Give it a try.
Tags : maps Yahoo! Pipes Google Maps Mashup VBA tutorial tech qed wiki teqlo coghead apartments craigslist visual programming |
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Affichage : 9767
Durée : 298 s |
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