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August 25, 2009

Tutorial: Turning a web site into a widget with YQL

YQL is a very powerful way to use several APIs without going through the pains of authenticating for each and every one of them. It is also a terribly easy way to take any content you find on the web and turn it into something you can easily re-style.

Turning a web page into a widget with yql by you.

Take this widget for example. It gets its data from this TV jokes website and uses only a few lines of JavaScript for the conversion. The steps are:

  • Find out the site structure.
  • Get a clever XPATH to where you want to go.
  • Use YQL to get the data from the third-party site.
  • Write a DOM script to convert it back to HTML


Learn how to do this yourself in my detailed step-by-step tutorial on how to scrape HTML with YQL.

Chris Heilmann (@codepo8)
Yahoo Developer Network

Posted at August 25, 2009 5:08 AM | Permalink

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