If you haven’t played with YQL before, put down that Hot Pocket and head over the Yahoo Developer Network. At the YQL console you’ll find a collection of resources to quickly attack problems with cut- and-paste simplicity instead of having to digest several pages of API documentation. You’ll also find examples with source code for putting your queries to work.
Below are five great YQL one-liners to get you thinking about the possibilities.
YQL One-Liners
Note: For the following examples simply follow the link and select the “TEST” button to review results.
- We all love Techmeme. Techmeme also loves their tips. Sometimes you just want to know who Techmeme thanks for those “tip @techmeme” tweets. With YQL you can use a simple query to see who Techmeme thanks.
- Of course, you might want priority access to tips before they make it to Techmeme. Here’s another very simple query to isolate Twitter users sending “tip @techmeme” tweets.
- There is more to life than Techmeme. In fact, there is also Hackernews. However, sometimes you just want to know if an article is worthy of your time. With this simple query you can limit your reading to high-scoring Hackernews articles
- There are a lot of ways to find out the location information of a given IP address. YQL provides a resource for geolocation by IP address as well. With this simple query you can find the city, state, and country associated with 8.8.8.8
- Last but not least, YQL is there for you after you step away from your computing haven. Now you can keep track of those memorable times at the pub when you spill something on someone.
The last few examples are made possible by Community Open Data Tables for YQL.
Hopefully, if this was your fist time seeing YQL it won’t be your last!
If you were already familiar with YQL, what are your five favorite examples? Let us know in the comments below.