Adding User Interactivity to Your Web Site

If you feel intimidated by server-side scripting languages, yet believe that your magnetic content and your Web site’s aesthetically pleasing behavior level is not enough to keep visitors from exiting your page, then fear not, developer - therein lies an easy way to add user-interactivity to your Web site without spending hours of time knee-deep in code.

In the following entry, we’ll take a look at using simple Web service APIs (Application Programming Interface) to spice up your Web site the quick and easy way. We won’t go into heavy detail, as this entry is more about generating your creative ideas first and foremost. We’ll cover the programming in future installments of Taming the Wild Wild Web.

Since the early 2000’s, there have been many large Web company’s that have given developers access to their data with free APIs. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo! and Flickr all support such developer efforts and they allow just about anyone the ability to build programs using their stored data.

Yahoo!’s Web Services is perhaps one of the easiest to take advantage of and one of the easiest to implement. Using RESTful architecture, Yahoo! Web Services allows you to query their database of Web content, new stories, maps, images and video, and then return the results in SimpleXML, JSON or Serialized PHP format.

Setting up your own application is as easy as applying for an API key - which is free - and then scripting a small application (it can be as little as five lines!) to query their data and output the result to your Web site.

In the next installment of Taming the Wild Wild Web, we’ll take a look at a sample program where we’ll query Yahoo!’s Web services to add user interactivity to our Web site.

Jeffrey Olchovy is a Web developer, designer and marketing strategist.