Another amazingly useful web site: http://ismycomputeron.com

Sometimes you come across web services that are so amazingly useful, you wonder why nobody has done it before. One of those is “Is my computer on?”:http://ismycomputeron.com sent to me this morning by “Tomas Caspers”:http://tomascaspers.de/.

While the usefulness of the service is indisputable the lack of RSS feed or API is actually annoying (let’s not discuss the HTML quality of the site, I am sure this is because of performance reasons as it is the case with other big players). Likeminded web dwellers like Dion Almaer “bemoaned the same fact”:http://twitter.com/dalmaer/statuses/1106428950 which is why I’ve taken matters into my own hand and used “YQL”:http://developer.yahoo.com/yql to turn this service into a JSON API:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20html%20where%20url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fismycomputeron.com%22%20and%20xpath%3D'%2F%2Fcenter%2Ffont%2Ftext()'&format=json&callback=isiton

This version wraps the resulting data (in my case “yes”) in a JSON object and calls the isiton() method. You can try it out for yourself.

If you want to change this simply rename isiton at the end of the url to your function name of choice. If you use alert() as the function name you could even turn this into a useful bookmarklet.

Of course you should never forget to support the library followers if you have a system like that and “Mattias Hising”:http://frontendbook.com came quickly to the rescue and built the system “as a jQuery plugin”:http://jsbin.com/ofiwi.

Tags: Add new tag, fun, geek, godosomerealworkyouchild, humour, isiton, jquery, JSON, web service, yahoo, yql

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 11:31 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.