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About the Cookbook
The Daylife Cookbook is a collection of recipes to help you bootstrap applications that use the Daylife platform (DayPI).
These recipes come from Daylifers and the cookbook community, with entries ranging from sample code to tutorials, half baked ideas, and spotlights of the latest deployments of the DayPI.
Feel free to share, steal, criticize, applaud, and feed back!
Resources
Testimonials
Daylife is a perfect fit for our strategy of presenting the best and most tightly focused content, whether it is produced by us at USA TODAY or anywhere else on the Web. It helps us provide our readers with a full 360-degree view of a given topic, and adds depth and richness to niche areas important to our readers and advertisers.- Jeff Webber, SVP, USAToday.com
You guys have what seems like an amazingly powerful and easy to use API, we're pretty excited about playing with it and possibly integrating it with Hubdub. - Tom Griffith, Hubdub.com
It's amazing how simple this is to integrate into django. When a view is creating a page, it just calls a thin wrapper function that I put around the daypi module. - Bracket Boy
I found the Daylife API for PHP really easy to use, and coded something up quickly for my site, Brooklyn and Beyond - Brooklyn & Beyond
This tool makes it really easy to get a quick look or dive in deep thanks to our partner Daylife, who built a comprehensive service that yields up-to-the-minute results - The Washington Post
I was trying to make it work by using Google News RSS feeds but turned out impossible since they don't organize their data in the feeds. I now know its possible with the Daylife API - Akash Xavier
DoodleBuzz
DoodleBuzz is a new way to read the news through an experimental interface that allows you to create typographic maps of current news stories.
DoodleBuzz - work in progress from Brendan Dawes on Vimeo
Why it was made
Does the web really need yet another news aggregator? In many ways the answer to this question is undoubtably no. But DoodleBuzz was born out of an idea to create an entirely new way of exploring information - one that allows for a kind of "quiet chaos" that gives people the opportunity to explore unthought of paths and connections along their news gathering journey. You may start at Iraq but end up finishing on Britney, whilst taking in The Catholic Church, Global Warming and 50 Cent.
The interface for DoodleBuzz is simply a scribbled line. Draw a straight line. Draw a curved line. Draw a crazy, chaotic, all-over-the-place messed up line. It's up to you how you want to layout the information - DoodleBuzz simply provides a blank canvas for you to use and abuse.
Why do that? Well, the web is full of top-down scrolling websites that are great for viewing information in a linear fashion, but not so good at fun things like chance and exploration. So a scribbled line seemed to be the antithesis of the scrolling linear paradigm. Do we want all sites to look like this? No, that would be stupid, but the web should always be a place of eclectic tastes and experiences. But more than anything it's just good to twist things up a bit.
How it was made
DoodleBuzz started life as a series of simple sketches in a notebook, originally looking at how to create an interface system that as much as possible moved away from the ubiquitous "click here" that seems to pervade the web.
A series of small interactive sketches created in Flash was then put together to explore the idea of placing "objects" along a scribbled line. After several iterations of these scribbling interface concepts, an information source was then needed to make best use of such an idea.
DayLife is creating a new architecture of news. They believe that reading the news should be more fun and less of a chore. So they've created a wonderfully powerful platform that allows designers, developers and artists to create new kinds of news applications using their DayPI
Over a period of two weeks (though in reality about 40 hours ot total time) DoodleBuzz was developed in Flash using Actionscript 3 with a little bit of PHP for good measure.