Mashup Guide

The book has been sent off to the printers! Apress has told me that I should be getting my author copies sometime next week, and that the books should hit the bookstores some weeks after that. In the meantime, you can pre-order the book from a number of sources:

• Apress (http://www.apress.com/book/view/159059858X)
• Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Pro-Web-2-0-Mashups-Remixing/dp/159059858X)
• Barnes and Noble (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9781590598580)
• your local independent bookseller (which you can locate with BookSense)

In the meantime, I'm working hard on repurposing my book into HTML and XML (probably DocBook) so that the book is in a more web-friendly format.   Apress and I are making the book available under a By-NC-SA-2.5 Creative Commons license -- meaning that you'll be able to circulate copies of the book for non-commercial reuse.  The problem is that my book went from being in Microsoft Word (for which I have some experience extracting content) to QuarkXPress during the copy-editing/proof-reading stages.

I might be able to figure out how to convert my book to DocBook, but I'm afraid that will probably take a while to do since I'm completely new to QuarkXPress (and things like the avenue.quark XTension). Can anyone out there help me to convert my book? I'm certainly willing to pay someone to do the task.

While finishing my book, it wasn't possible for me to keep up with all the changes that were happening with the many web applications I track in the book.  One such change came in Yahoo! Pipes:  Pipes Blog » Blog Archive » New "Fetch Page" module and nice web path enhancement….

I have to try the Pipes Fetch Page Module to do some scraping of HTML pages. Also one can start using nicer URLs for various pipes.   For instance,

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?InputURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Fservices%2Fxml%2Frss%2Fnyt%2FInternational.xml&_id=cInT4D7B3BGMoxPNiXrL0A&_render=kml

can now be substituted with

http://pipes.yahoo.com/raymondyee/locationextractor?InputURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Fservices%2Fxml%2Frss%2Fnyt%2FInternational.xml&_render=kml

Last night, I finished writing the introduction, cover blurb, and acknowledgments for my book.  With any luck, that means that all the remains for me is editing the galley proofs that come back to me.  The current estimate is that my book will be in bookstores in February.

This blog has been very quiet for the past couple of months.  I learned that for me at least, the last stages of writing a book soaked up whatever energy I would have had to put into blogging.   Now, I expect to return to writing here, to highlight parts of my book, to publicize it, to update it as I can, and to interact with you my readers.

Once the book is out, I will then update this site to hold the published edition of the book instead of the current early drafts.

I will writing my notes here from Mashup Camp IV, where I hope to see many of the people I've been corresponding with and writing about over the last months.

In Chapter 13, I cover how to use some of major mapping APIs: Google Maps, Yahoo, Mapquest, and Microsofts'. It would be convenient to be able to not worry about the differences among the maps and easily switch among the various maps. That's the promise of a mapping"abstraction" library such as Mapstraction (http://mapstraction.com). We'll have to see how and whether it is widely used to gauge the library's effectiveness.

Along a different vein is OpenLayers (http://www.openlayers.org/), which is:

a pure JavaScript library for displaying map data in most modern web browsers, with no server-side dependencies. OpenLayers implements a (still-developing) JavaScript API for building rich web-based geographic applications, similar to the Google Maps and MSN Virtual Earth APIs, with one important difference -- OpenLayers is Free Software, developed for and by the Open Source software community.

You can try out OpenLayers in FlashEarth. Go to the site and select OpenLayers. You might have to zoom out sufficiently to see any tiles (e.g., http://www.flashearth.com/?lat=38.417308&lon=-122.271821&z=9.9&r=0&src=ol)

I know about the Firefox add-on/extension mechanism but what about the corresponding element of other web browsers? Here's what a series of quick web searches turned up:

Firefox

• Firefox Extension Development Tutorial :: Overview
• XULPlanet.com

Opera

• Opera widgets: Opera Widgets - Weather, News, and More
• Opera User Javascript -- Opera's take on Greasemonkey: UserJS.org - User JavaScript for Opera

Internet Explorer

• CodeGuru: Internet Explorer Extension
• an official forum
  • Welcome - MSDN Forums
  • Internet Explorer Developer Center
  • IE Development

Safari

• Pimp My Safari: about:
  It was started as a reaction to the sites cataloguing Firefox extensions. Many excellent plugins for Safari have been developed, but because Safari doesn’t have an official ‘extension architecture’, many don’t know of these extensions.

I'll see how much 'll be able to cover these various mechanisms in detail in the book.

Although I'm writing my mashup book in Microsoft Word, I'd like to publish it in a variety of forms, including HTML, various varieties of XML, PDF, wiki-markup. There are various ways to extract content out of my Word documents, including Word macros, external scripts using the COM interface, or saving the Word 2003 documents as Word XML. I'm partial to using Python to do some simple extraction of text as a first step:

 
 

import win32com.client  
wd = win32com.client.Dispatch("Word.Application")  
doc = wd.Documents.Open(r'D:\\Document\\PersonalInfoRemixBook\\858Xch05__.doc')  
print doc.Content.Text

I've not been able to find complete reference documentation for the Word 2003 object model. Word 2003 Object Model was a blank page for me under "Objects". Best, probably, to look at documentation for Office XP.