Wednesday, July 02, 2008 12:00:57 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Spent most of the evening designing a flag for the upcoming Kendal's Calling and Tan Hill festivals, with my partner in crime Jo, who last worked with me to create the artwork for a present when visiting a band we like called The Witch and the Robot. The flag was a lot harder to come up with an idea for, having a canvas which is so many square feet in diameter. We settled with something we liked in the end though, so we'll have fun sewing and painting that later this week, stand by for photos!

Then the rest of the evening wasted in Diablo II with Owen, but that's all fun and nostalgic so why worry about that eh?

Because of the above, I've barely gotten any Scrobbles done tonight, but I did just sit down and polish off the embedded data from external websites, a very simple fix with a fresh mind and it was done.

So, this is the product of that.

This is a snippet, with nothing in it but an application calling into an external service.

Click here for xml in a new window

Walking through that from top to bottom:

• We have some inputs. These are entered by the user on adding the snippet to their profile. This allows the user to add the snippet multiple times and configure it differently each time.
• We then have the actual application itself, inside a Data section, which simply calls a third party web page and passes it the Character and the Realm originally entered by the user.
• In the Layout section, we simply say "I want this Application's data here". This way, several applications can be utilised within the same snippet, along with all the ordinary stuff you might find in a snippet.

Behind the aspx page being called, the following code can be found:

Click here for code in a new window

All I'm doing here is

• Ensuring the page returns plain old XML
• Creating a context from the sdk which takes care of authentication for us
• Pulling the variables out and pushing them into a query which
• Outputting the results of along with a bunch of text as html. (Well, a limited subset of html, of course).

This results in the following being displayed in the user's page. It's a really trivial example so the amount of overhead required for two lines of text doesn't seem worth it, but I guess that's always the way with trivial examples.

With this, the possibilities for representing data are endless, I can think of hundreds of ways I'd like to use this system so hopefully so will my users. If I get any that is.

It's kinda cool to get this working, as this was one of my original visions when I started last year.

Tomorrow I'll be going all out on Scrobbles again, I think I'm going to work through the documentation and get that completely sorted out, with perhaps a few more API tweaks to allow for direct access to pre-generated queries from external websites.