In celebration of the new WSO2 Mashup Server 1.5.2 release I’ve been looking through some of my old mashups and maintaining them and adding some new features where appropriate. Here is a summary:
- Sri Lanka Incident Mashup – the page I was scraping changed (factored into multiple pages) so for older history I had to update my scraping code. I added unique identifiers for each data point and an operation to add a manual override in cases where the English-to-integer parsing was insufficient, and added controls from the UI to make it easy to add these corrections.
- National Geographic Picture of the Day Mashup – I added operation safety to make it easier to use from as a RESTful service, added a global variable to hide the test operations when not in “debug mode”, fixed the links back to the picture-of-the-day page, updated the internal logic to use the Feed object (I wrote this before the feed object could handle media modules), stripped some script tags from the description, and added a format parameter that determines whether the feed format should be returned in RSS 2.0 or in Atom 0.3.
These still are pretty useful mashups to me. (Along with my southwest agent which I’ve improved a lot but can’t offer publicly.) Too bad they both rely on scraping, which makes regular maintenance a necessary to prevent bit-rot. We need more Web services alongside with Web sites!
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