Hacking for Innovation Christian Heilmann
| http://wait-till-i.com | http://scriptingenabled.org Sunderland, UK, University Hack Challenge, January 2009

Hello, I am Chris.

I am a hacker and
a geek.

The term hacking has a
lot of different meanings.

To me it means: “Altering
a system to do what you want it to do using what is at your disposal.”

It also means having a
lot of fun trying to make things do what they weren’t made for.

It is unrestrained innovation.

So welcome, innovators!

We’re here to host a
University Hack Challenge

We want you to show
us what can be built using the systems we (and others) offer...

...that makes a difference in
your lives and make the things you care about easier to achieve.

Find something that always annoyed
you with systems you use...

...and build a workaround.

You’ll be amazed about the
impact this can have.

To reach hackvana you need
three things:

Access, Data and Users

Access happens on several
channels.

The oldest way is to
cheat your way in using a very cool piece of software.

Using cURL, you can be
your own browser and get any data from the web to remix.

The problems are that you
don’t get the data back in a structured way.

You’re at the mercy of
the HTML structure and if that one changes your hack fails to work.

This is why clever companies
realized that it does make sense to offer their data in easier to digest formats.

RSS or Really Simple Syndication
was born.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/restaurants

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/restaurants/rss

Using RSS or Atom feeds
you get data in a predictable and easy to convert format.

It doesn’t allow you to
request specific data or define a different format though.

This was the next step:
REST APIs or Web Services.

REST based Web Services allow
you to request the correct data from a system.

Which brings you to the
second hack ingredient: data.

Yahoo Answers
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com

http://answers.yahooapis.com/
AnswersService/V1/questionSearch?
query=sunderland&region=uk&lang=e
n&appid=yahoodemo

... lots more...

http://developer.yahoo.com/answers/V1/questionSearch.html

A lot of web services
also allow you to choose your data format.

http://answers.yahooapis.com/
AnswersService/V1/questionSearch?
query=sunderland&region=uk&lang=e
n&appid=yahoodemo&start=1&output=
json&callback=useme

This makes it dead easy
to get the data and re-use it in your own interfaces.

What if you want to
use several sources?

There’s Yahoo Pipes for mixing,
filtering and matching.

http://pipes.yahoo.com

Or if you like SQL-style
data conversion there’s YQL:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/

Both of these systems allow
you to reach data from Yahoo and other services and pre- filter it for use in your own hacks.

Now you got the access
and you got the data. Time to consider the users.

Building *working* web interfaces is
a specialist skill.

I’ve been developing for the
web for 12 years and it still is a mystery to me why some things just don’t work.

The technologies are easy enough:
HTML for structure CSS for presentation JavaScript for behaviour

Where it gets truly annoying
is the unknowns.

You have no idea about
the user’s setup, ability or rights to change their technical environment.

And then there are the
browsers and all their wonderful bugs and quirks.

This is why it is
a good start to use libraries or frameworks.

Their only reason of being
is to make your life as a developer easier and development less random.

Here are our helpers: YUI
BluePrint http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/ http://mobile.yahoo.com/developers

Using these, you can quickly
build interfaces that work on the web and mobiles.

What about reach?

The newest way of access
that systems and companies allow you these days is opening up their address books.

http://developer.yahoo.com/social/socialdir/
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/
http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php

Instead of building it and
waiting till people come, build where the people are.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yap/

How about
some hack
examples?

I am a big fan
of accessibility.

The web is supposed to
be for everybody – regardless of physical or mental access restrictions.

At Accessibility2.0 Antonia Hyde asked
for a video player that works for people with learning disabilities.

http://www.slideshare.net/hi.antonia/rich-
media-and-web-apps-for-people-with-learning-
disabilities

Shortly before YouTube announced their
API to build your own YouTube Player.

I took the API and
Antonia’s findings and built EasyYouTube.

Screenshot of Easy YouTube http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube/?http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkdZmi85gxk

Easy controls ★ Option to
search for videos ★ Copy and paste video URL to share ★ Select video size ★ Easy Volume Control ★ Option to show a playlist created with del.icio.us ★ Option to search YouTube ★ API to automatically open videos in Easy YouTube ★ Documentation how to host it yourself ★ Open Source ★

Another example: I use Twitter
– a lot.

Not all of my updates
there are valid for re-distribution though.

So I use Pipes to
filter my updates and get them back as JSON: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info? _id=f7229d01b79e508d543fb84e8a0abb0dd

And adding a few more
lines of JavaScript I can now display my “useful tweets” on my blog:

http://www.wait-till-i.com/2008/09/28/useful-tweets-with-pipe/

Another example: I use SlideShare
– a lot.

http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/slideshows

One cool thing is that
SlideShare automatically creates transcripts of your slides:

So I’ve used this to
create a version that is easily accessible for blind people or those who don’t have Flash.

http://icant.co.uk/easy-slideshare/?slides=http://
www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/playing-with-the-web-
presentation

Using YQL, it was also
easy to write a JavaScript wrapper that allows you to show the transcripts with your slides.

http://www.wait-till-i.com/2009/01/11/adding-transcripts-to-
presentations-embedded-from-slideshare-using-yql/

However, coming here I wanted
to show a quick new example and spent an hour on Sunday on a hack.

I think I said, I
use Twitter – a lot.

I got all this emails
from Twitter telling me about people following me.

What I didn’t get was
it telling me when people left me.

Or what I was telling
the world before they left me.

So I dug into the
API a bit and built TweetEffect.com

http://tweeteffect.com/?user=codepo8

I put it up, and
started testing edge cases.

One of them was Guy
Kawasaki, whom I knew has a lot of followers and updates.

One of them was Guy
Kawasaki, whom I knew has a lot of followers and updates.

And that started a landslide
of visitors, comments and ideas for it.

Tim O'Reilly Guy Kawasaki Ryan
Carson

What about reach? That was
me, time for you to show what you can do!

Innovation is not a matter
of skill or being in the right job position.

It is a matter of
wanting to change what we have and be ready to play.

We do this to help
you see your potential.

And we do this to
see if we do a good job in explaining our offers to the developer world.

The web is yours, go
out and play!

THANKS! Christian Heilmann http://wait-till-i.com http://scriptingenabled.org
http://twitter.com/codepo8 Moon bridal hat photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/foxtongue/23309042/ All other photos of the interwebs