My First Hack!
There was a Hack Day at Yahoo! today. Yahoo! Hack Day is a day long event where programmers present innovative applications and mashups built using Yahoo! web services and products. Developers start working on their application twenty four hours before the presentation which was Monday noon this time. If you are participating you can work on the project regardless of your day to day work. Today there were one hundred and thirty hacks presented.
This was a first Hack Day presentation for me. I developed a hack called Apartments on Yahoo! Map. I built this using Y! Maps, Y! Pipes, Y! Answers and craigslist apartment listings. The way it works is—after user selects a city; script pulls apartment listings RSS feed from craigslist. This RSS feed is ran through Y! Pipes to extract the location information. Once I have the location information, I am plotting every apartment location on Y! Map using Maps API. This hack also uses answers API to query real-estate and apartments related questions asked by Yahoo users. See it in action here.
Do you know that your traffic mashup still gets hits on our site? Some guy told us he looked at it all the time to assess traffic conditions. How’s that?
Nice work on your new mashup. I’m glad we’re not paying California prices! Whew!
Just a note: on Windows 2000 Pro and IE6 your map appears at the bottom of the page. Just an FYI.
Hey, do you want a job?
I’d love to see the apartment finder work across the U.S., if not California, if not San Diego county….
Yeah, that will be in my list of enhancements to this hack. Thanks!