Pipe Badges .:. kentbrewster.com

About a year ago, I had the enormous good fortune to sit just over the cubicle wall from the Yahoo! Pipes team during their launch. During that time I was lucky enough to overhear talk about a couple of as-yet-undocumented features, the _render=json and _callback=foo parameters. These two features allowed me to use Pipes to turn any RSS feed into a JSON object wrapped in the callback of my choice, and to launch the Badger, a crude-but-effective wizard-in-a-Web-page that allowed anyone to do the same.

During the intervening months I've had a chance to give Pipes a workout. Examples range from the simple Badger application to rolling a complete API layer to cover a multitude of different sites and endpoints.

This morning, the Pipes team launched a new feature, Pipe Badges. Using several of the ideas collected in Case-Hardened JavaScript, Pipe Badges allow the site operator to include a single line of JavaScript, hosted by Pipes, and see one of three handy badges--list, image, or map view--pop up instantly.

If I'm not mistaken, this:

<script src="http://pipes.yahoo.com/js/mapbadge.js">{
   "pipe_id":"WlLkGRj63BGEG7TKiHrL0A",
   "_btype":"map",
   "pipe_params":{
      "q":"pizza",
      "g":"95051"
   }
}</script>

... is just about the single easiest way to search for something near something, and display the results as a map on your site. Here we're searching for pizza near 95051; parameters q and g can be changed to anything you like.

Pipe Badges are the result of many months of coding by the Pipes team, including Jonathan Trevor and Paul Donnelly. Awesome work, you guys; keep it up!

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