My talk at ignite London explaining the benefits of allowing people to use the infrastructure they are used to and bring their content onto the web instead of forcing them into a web interface they don't like using.

1. Treading the
cowpaths of the
information
superhighway.
Chris&an Heilmann, Ignite, London, 2nd of March 2010
Today I will talk about a way of trying to get the web to be more inclusive to people who
really should use it, but cannot be bothered. I will show you how you can easily use
information created by those who know to create information and put it on the web
without spending any money.

2. To the interwebs!
Right now we are trying to get everybody to use the internet. We are very excited about it
and everybody else should be, too.

3. The revolution of social media changed our lives completely and it is tough to
understand why not everybody is as excited about it as we are.

4. Hamstering.
However, when companies start to build web systems you will find something like this.
Instead of embracing the simplicity of the web and give people a chance to digest
information piece by piece we overload them with interfaces that look exactly like the
ones they use on the desktop.

5. In essence, it is tough to explain our passion and get people to embrace the web the way
we do - enough to turn you gaga.

6. The thing is though that companies do have already a working and very much used IT
infrastructure - one that people got trained in using and are happy to use. That these
pieces of software are Desktop-driven shouldn’t bother us.

7. What we should concentrate on is the data created in these systems and if they are
useful for web consumption. If they are, we should try to find a way to convert them and
get them out there. Most of the time a lot of valuable information goes into
spreadsheets but only a fraction of it makes it into the CMS.

8. We then use our own toys and building blocks to get this information out as a web-
friendly interface.

9. http://winterolympicsmedals.com
This is winterolympicsmedals.com - a search interface for winter olympics medals from
1924 up to now, searchable by country, medal type, sport, discipline and allowing you to
compare the success of different countries side-by-side.

10. The data that drives the whole site and builds the navigation and the interface is all
stored in an Excel sheet the Guardian released on their data blog. Every week the
Guardian releases the information behind their articles as spreadsheets - which is an
amazing service.

11. I took the Guardian spreadsheet, created a copy in Google docs and published it to the
web as a CSV file. CSV is a terribly easy to parse data format. Now what I needed to do
was accessing this data by the different cells and columns.

12. select * from csv where url="http://
spreadsheets.google.com/pub?
key=tpWDkIZMZleQaREf493v1Jw&output=
csv" and
columns="Year,City,Sport,Discipline,Countr
y,Event,Gender,Type" where Year="1924"
And this is where Yahoo’s YQL is an amazingly useful tool. Using the CSV as a data
source and giving it a list of columns you can easily filter by each of the columns and
create complex queries. The query gets sent to a web API and you get the data back
either as XML or a JSON.

13. Building the interface was as easy - using the YUI grids builder I put together a HTML
skeleton and simply added my data where I wanted it to appear. The CSS is even hosted
by Yahoo on a server network for me.

14. This made me think that it would be useful to have this as a generic solution which is
why I put together csvtowebservice.php which allows you to create a filtering form and
result datatables from a CSV on the web.

15. http://data.gov.uk/
The Guardian is not the only resource that releases interesting spreadsheets with
information that can be converted with a script like that. Data.gov.uk is still quite new
and offers thousands of government data sets as excel sheets.

16. http://uk-house-prices.com
For the release of data.gov.uk I was asked to build a demo and this is what I did: http://
uk-house-prices.com - an interface to compare house prices throughout England from
1996 up to now - again driven by a single CSV.

17. *
*bleep
I think it is time we stop being fanboys of our own environment and instead see how we
can communicate and link with the other - already existing - networks to take their data
and bring it onto the web.

18. And maybe, just maybe - if we manage to build very compelling interfaces really quickly
we give corporate IT the hint that upgrading is a great plan.

19. If you want to know more, there is a video of me talking for a whole 48 minutes about
using these systems to build uk-house-prices.com and other solutions available in
German and English on the Yahoo User Interface blog.

20. Chris&an Heilmann
h?p://wait‐&ll‐i.com Cheers
h?p://developer‐evangelism.com
h?p://twi?er.com/codepo8
That’s it! Now you go and build something!