I’ve been busy with the Pageflake developers API and the YouTube API. The Pageflakes documentation is not very good so I had to figure out how to display the loading bar without using their showProgress() method that I can’t get to work. Then I had to find a way to get the refresh button to work with JSON data feeds. I think that only works with RSS feeds by default. I also found a way to give myself some credit in the Settings and how to save a setting. I created a Pownce flake and a Stickam flake which I’m using on my Pageflakes pages.
I’m also doing more work with the YouTube API. I added a page to my web site where you can back up your Subscriptions information to Excel. Now I’m working on a web page that will provide a custom display of a YouTube video’s comments. This should be really useful. I plan to show the user’s profile thumbnail so you can more easily identify the vlogger who left the comment. That is a feature of the commenting system on LiveVideo. I will also highlight your comments and automatically scroll the page to bring it into view. You will be able to view some profile information by mousing over the profile thumbnail and the comments will appear as thought balloons. I plan to put a lot of effort into this comment system design because this is one area where YouTube could really use some improvement. It is one of the social networking features of the site that gets very little attention. This project is proving to be fairly difficult. It took me several hours to figure out how to convert XML child nodes into nested unordered lists so I can display replies properly indented. The YouTube API doesn’t even return comment replies as XML child nodes so I will need to re-organize the XML nodes.
