Archive for March, 2010

Web scraping with YQL, jQuery and JSONP

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Using screenr, I’ve just recorded a new sub-five minute screencast detailing a web scraping example using YQL, jQuery and JSONP.

In the video, I quickly introduce YQL‘s web scraping capability by returning a the contents of an HTML element on the JustGiving website. The data is obtained using jQuery’s getJSON method via JSONP for a cross-domain request. It’s short, but simple, and aims to give a brief example of what’s possible using YQL and jQuery.

WordPress 2.7 Cookbook – Book Review

Monday, March 15th, 2010

WordPress 2.7 Cookbook

Packt Publishing’s WordPress 2.7 Cookbook has been out for while now, but I still thought I’d pick up a copy and give it the once-over. Rather than being a reference guide, Jean-Baptiste Jung‘s book is very much like his very own WpRecipes.com website.

Logorama wins Best Animated Short Film at the 2010 Academy Awards

Monday, March 8th, 2010

I first heard about Logorama when I visited David Airey’s great logo site, Logo Design Love. Lucky enough to watch a the entire film (see below), I was blown away by the animation and sheer number of logos, integrated into the story in an inventive and creative way.

I was happy to hear this morning that the film has won the Best Animated Short Film award at the 2010 Academy Awards!

Digging into WordPress – version 2.0 released

Monday, March 1st, 2010

If you haven’t read my review of Digging into WordPress, you may not know that I think it’s currently the best WordPress book available.

One thing I didn’t mention in the review is that when you buy it, you’re entitled to free PDF updates for life. Perhaps I left out this because I thought it would amount to the odd grammar correction and so on. Worthwhile, but not that exciting. How wrong I was, because as co-author Chris Coyier announces on the Digging into WordPress site, version 2.0 has been released and it promises an extra chapter dedicated to WordPress 2.9, as well as one called ‘Bonus Tricks’, which focuses on ‘some cool new tricks for your themes’. I’ve only skimmed through the new pages, but the high quality writing and content is preserved.

If you haven’t already grabbed yourself a copy, you should do yourself a favour and buy it!