On the road...
Imagine the following scenario. You are on the road, no wireless lan in sight and you need some information regarding TechEd 07. You remember that there was a blog on SDN about it but the printout is lying on your desk at work. What can you do?
No problem just use this new website which allows you to search for weblogs on SDN and is especially optimized for mobile devices like the iPhone or a Blackberry.
How does it look like?
My main goal was to build a simple and functional site. The screenshot below shows the results for the query "teched 07".
Here is another example. This time the query is "ruby on rails".
When you click on a result item the application downloads the blog from SDN and removes the frame which usually surrounds it. This makes it easier to read blogs on small displays or with a browser which does not support frames.
The generated traffic is minimal. Each query with 20 results costs around 8kb of traffic (assuming the logo gets cached by the device). This is great for people who do not have unlimited data.
How does it work?
The application uses Yahoo's Web Search REST API which is very easy to use and delivers solid results. A developer simply constructs a url which contains the query and gets a XML document as a response. The following example is a query which searches all blog posts on SDN with the word ABAP:
In the end the rails application parses the XML document and displays the results.
Try it!
Make sure you give it a test drive just click here. Please be aware that I consider this application as a prototype and there is no guarantee that it will work 100% of the time.
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