Introduction
Using the Twitter API as a starting point, World Citizen News gets you the Twitter buzz, weather forecast, local time & map for popular cities around the world, images of selected location from flickr, news based on the trending Twitter topics, for a choosen location. It is especially recommended for travelers and geography buffs. This article will explain how this mashup is built. This is a work in progress and there are a bunch of features that are planned. It is hosted on a Windows Azure Web Site service. You can try it online and also keep watching how it evolves.
Why Azure?
These are the top 3 reasons I find Azure useful:
- Easy to get started - build your application with Visual Studio or WebMatrix, click Publish when you're done
- Multiple deployment options
- Scale on demand - computing resources can be added or removed based on website visitor volume, and budgeted cost without any major upfront fees.
I have an Azure account via MSDN which gives subscribers some free benefits. These resources are extremely useful for hobbyists and developers to explore Azure.
Background
All the information displayed on the mashup web page is generated dynamically. World Citizen News currently makes use of the following APIs & libraries -
Each API "feeds" the other. Twitter Trends gets the keywords for Google News to search on (hashtags from Twitter Trends are ignored). The Trends are fetched for a location based on Yahoo! Where On Earth ID (WOEID). Once a city is selected, its WOEID is used to fetch weather information via Yahoo Weather and YQL, as well as flickr images specific to that location. Yahoo Weather gets us latitude and longitude based on the WOEID. The coordinates are used to get the current local time and map for the selected place. The Amazon ad is configured to use the city and country names as keywords to fetch book titles that may have those nouns.
As the entire process is automated, some results may be off the mark but they may still be hilarious.
Code Overview
Will be added soon...
Points of Interest
Will be added soon...
History
2013-May-9: Article published
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