Keep IT Simple

Yesterday, I blogged about mash ups and how they make it possible for a single web developer who can not possibly be a programming guru and a graphic artists top notch at the same time.

To a certain degree, I am one of these web developers. Humility aside, I can do complex functions with PHP and MySQL but I have to admit that I am kind of deficient on the graphics side. Perhaps what they say that artists are born and not made could be true.

I remember an artist friend who works for an ad agency who had an altercation with his non artist manager. In my friend’s anger, he blurted “give me 2 month and I can be a manager and I will give you 2 years and see if you can be an artist”.

Well, you got the point there. But with mashups, one can develop a website where he can optimize his programming skills and leave the rest to mashups. And then come up with an output that can be aesthetically presentable and amazingly interactive at the same time.

So how do we work with mashups? Simple. And oh, it is also possible that somebody who is neither an artist or a coding guru can come up with a good website with mashups. Let’s just say, its more of the drag and drop style of web making.

First of all is you must have the idea of what you like. You might want to have a mashup website that features tourist attractions in different cities but you want the website to have a map so you use Google Earth to be mashed up.

Once you have your ideas in place, fire up you mashup editor. The most popular mashup editors are Google Mashup editor, Microsoft Popfly and Yahoo! Pipes.

The Google Mashup Editor is currently in beta phase but I have used Microsoft Popfly where I could create a mashup with geographical maps in less than one minute. I just used photos from Flickr and maps from Virtual Earth, drag and dropped some boxes, set some configurations, and voila! I had a professional looking cityscape complete with attractive photos corresponding to locations within the map.

For many other features to take from other sources, I can choose many other application programming interfaces (APIs). Popular sites like YouTube have very easy to use APIs. I can also take APIs for shopping cart service (but this can involve some degree mastery in back end programming as this involves security). Some of the most widely used APIs are from del.icio.us, Flickr, Twitter and Amazon web services.

Okay, so that is just about. Simple isn’t it? But oh, you need to consider you web hosting. Most mashups are from websites that use back end programming (which you don’t worry) and so they need server side language support (which you need to worry). Well, maybe worry is such a strong word. The internet is full of web hosting sites that have server side language support!

Happy mashing!