12 Great Do-It-Yourself PC Projects

Make Your Own Web Mashup

A Web mashup collects services and functions such as maps, search engines, RSS feeds, music, and images from two or more Web sites and combines them to produce a new and (ideally) uniquely useful application.

A classic example is HousingMaps, which blends Craigslist's housing-for-rent listings and Google Maps to display the physical locations of housing that's available for rent.

Services from Amazon to Yahoo have made their features available for incorporation into new mashups via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) at their Web sites. You can find and use everything from directory listings to video searches to GPS data to shopping carts. Unfortunately, combining this raw data into something new is extremely difficult for nonprogrammers. Luckily, software tools designed to simplify the process are just now beginning to crop up.

Start With Yahoo's Pipes

One tool that's available now (several others are still in beta) to help nonprogrammers build mashups is Yahoo's Pipes. Even in Pipes, you're a lot better off if you have the mindset of a programmer, since building mashups from scratch there is somewhat challenging. But it still offers a fairly quick way to get your feet wet with mashups.

That's because at Pipes you'll find a ton of mashups that other people have already built and posted. Pipes allows you to open one of these mashups, clone it, and save it with no trouble at all. Beginning with an existing design, you can start tweaking it to make it your own.

We grabbed and cloned a popular and simple mashup called YouTunes, which finds YouTube videos for the top ten songs at iTunes. It accomplishes this by snagging a "Top Ten Songs" RSS feed from the iTunes store and then running a search at YouTube for all video titles that match the song titles listed there.

But you may not want to watch videos of the top ten songs; you may be more interested in, say, the videos for the top ten songs on the iTunes Alternative Charts. To customize this mashup accordingly, simply replace the existing iTunes RSS feed in the 'Fetch Feed' box (in Pipes' Edit view) with the "Alternative Top 10" RSS feed from the iTunes Store. You can get that feed (and many others) from the iTunes Store RSS Feed Generator. You then save your newly customized "pipe" and click the Run Pipe link at the top of the page. You'll see a nice, clean list of YouTube videos corresponding to the iTunes Alternative Top 10.

When you start to feel more comfortable with the concept, Pipes can walk you through the process of building a mashup from scratch. For more on using Pipes, see "Eight Great, Simple Ways to Hack the Web."

Mashup Editors Coming Soon

Other tools to help nonprogrammers make cool mashups are in the works. Microsoft says that its alpha-stage PopFly WYSIWYG mashup editor will work with any API written in JavaScript. Meanwhile, the Google Mashup Editor is being beta-tested by a small number of developers, and should be ready for action in the next few months.

Jon L. Jacobi and Mark Sullivan