Planet Australia Coming Along

In the past few weeks I have been chipping away at making Planet Australia a reality.

I know I could have just taken Planet Planet or Sam Ruby's Planet Venus and tweaked it to achieve what I was looking for but I wanted to get my hands dirty with some new technology.

So far I am using Yahoo! Pipes to aggregate the feeds into a single feed. It has proved to be useful, simple and flexible. My only concern is whether it will scale to dozens of feeds and the millions of viewers I am hoping for (sic). I am assuming Yahoo! has thought about some of these issues so we will see how it goes.

To consume the data I am using Yahoo! Pipes' JSON output and, at the moment, I am parsing it directly on the page using JavaScript. To retrieve the JSON feed and render the content onto the page using the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library.

In fact I am doing everything in JavaScript at the moment for no other reason than I thought it would be interesting to see how far I get. So far so good with the only server-side code I am running being a simple PHP proxy to the Pipes data to get around cross-site scripting permissions.

Now that I have the basics in place I might actually look at whether I move some of the code to the server-side to help with a fallback mode. I might want to look at Planet Australia on my Blackberry and its stupid default browser appears to support only the very basics of HTML.

Below is a screen shot of how things appear at the moment. The only tab working at the moment is "Companies". I would like to get People and an "All" tab working before I launch but that won't be too hard. The graphic design could be tweaked a bit to be more Aussie too.

If you have any companies/people you would like to see listed let me know.

Comments

[Martin Wells]

Can't wait to see it. It's a great idea Andrew.