On the things we build and the things we consume.
using the atlas api with jquery
I thought I’d give you a quick intro to using the Atlas API’s JSON format with the ever popular JQuery.
Altas allows you to specify a callback function that the resulting JSON should be wrapped in, which JQuery is then able to use to make a JSONP request. This means you can make requests to the Atlas API from your website directly from the user’s browser, even though they’re on completely different domains. You can read the JQuery getJSON() documentation if you want to know more about how this works.
The following snippet (kindly donated by @ayrez, as they all are) shows how you can use JQuery to retrieve a list of Channel4’s currently highlighted brands. The highlights page itself doesn’t exist, but Atlas automatically maintains it. As you can see, JQuery allows you to trigger a JSONP request by including ‘callback=?’ in the URL.
As I mentioned, this will return a number of highlighted brands, with which you can then do interesting things. If you click on this page it will show them all moving about the page in an appealing fashion, using some simple JQuery animation. This can be used for all kinds of queries, for example: what brands are currently in the ‘entertainment’ genre?
This is achieved using the following code—a little bit of Atlas and a lot of animation, as you can see.
Another handy thing that Atlas does is keep an eye on the video links that people post to Twitter, index them and maintain a list of what’s recently been mentioned. Therefore, it’s pretty simple to use this visualisation to display what’s hot on Twitter.
Hopefully these simple examples demonstrate how easy it is to get up-and-running with Atlas. We’ve started an App Gallery to showcase the apps and hacks that use the API so hack away, tell us what you’ve made, and we’ll likely feature it soon after.
archive
feed