Making things at 2Morro

We’re at the 2morro festival today where the Making This for 2Morro team are busy at work creating mash-ups and applications in the ‘Hack Space’.

With the rapid growth in activities available through the Plings API (the graph below show the recent leap in activity instances in the system as more local authorities get their activity data into the system ahead of the Summer holidays) we’ll be exploring loads of different ways to get information out of Plings and to young people.

Activities between January and July 2009

So, if you are ‘Making things at 2morro’, or you’re just looking to explore quick ways to combine and display positive activity data in new ways – here’s a few notes to help you get started…

The data that’s available:

The Output API
All the documentation on the Output API is here and it is the way to get data direct from Plings. The API lets anyone get RSS and KML feeds of recent data from Plings.

To get an RSS feed of activities for the next two days use:

http://feeds.plings.net/rss.activity.php/1

To get an RSS feed of activities for the next seven days use:

http://feeds.plings.net/rss.activity.php/6

If you want to restrict your results to a particular town then you can add it onto the end:

http://feeds.plings.net/rss.activity.php/1/town/Manchester

You will also find data if you try:
Stockport
Blackpool
Coventry
Birmingham

If you would prefer to get a KML feed (for maps and Google Earth) or iCal feed (for calenders) then change ‘rss’ for ‘kml’ or ‘ical’ to get:

KML:

http://feeds.plings.net/kml.activity.php/6

iCal

http://feeds.plings.net/ical.activity.php/6

You can also get full records on each activity in XML. Just ask for an output API key and more details on how to do this.

Generic Activities
Plings doesn’t yet cover the whole country, so we’ve been putting together a list of ‘generic activities’ with links to national sources of information about that activity (so instead of ‘Football in Durham on Friday’ which the Plings Output API can give, you can fetch a record with ‘Football’ and a description of ‘Football’ plus some extra data).

The ‘Describe It’ activity we’re running at 2Morro will helping us get better generic descriptions, but for now you can find details of how to fetch the Generic Plings in XML format here:

http://generic.plings.net/

Local Offer Websites
We’ve been finding and tagging websites from local authorities across the country which provide details of positive activities from young people.

We’ve tagged them on social bookmarking website delicious with the tag ‘youth-offer’, plus their local area.

You can get an RSS feed of tags on delicious using the link below:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/youth-offer?count=200

You can fetch just the local offer sites tagged with a particular local area name by combining tags with +

For example:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/youth-offer+london?count=150

Plings info on Flickr
We’ve uploaded stacks of images and icons relating the positive activities to our Flickr account which you can find here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/plings

Look for RSS and KML links at the bottom of each page when you explore images and sets of images in order to mash up these as well.

The Things We Can Build With

There are almost unlimited possibilities for building things with Plings data. Here are just a few:

Widgets
You could build a widget to display upcoming activities using a tool like Widgetbox’s Blidget (easy – use a Plings RSS feed), or creating your own Google Gadget (a bit more advanced…).

Filter, merge, mash-up

If the Plings API isn’t quite giving the output you need then you could use Yahoo Pipes to process, filter and otherwise modify the Plings data coming through. Plings developer David recently wrote up tips on using Pipes to re-write links from the output API.

Twitter

You can connected a feed of activities up to Twitter. We’ve done it for Stockport Plings using Twitterfeed, but that can get a bit overwhelming when there are lots of activities on. What ways could you think of using Twitter for promoting positive activities?

Google Spreadsheets

You can get data from Plings into a Google Spreadsheet using the ‘=ImportXML’ forumula against an RSS feed.

For example, the function “=ImportXML(‘http://feeds.plings.net/rss.activity.php/1′,’//rss/channel/item/title’)” will populate the column of the spreadsheet it is in with the titles of upcoming activities.

More to come…