Yesterday programmableweb finally made me go signup over at dothegreenthing.com, a website who’s inspirational stories, videos, and simple actions can help anyone live a greener life.

Although I have seen their logo around the net for a little while now, I’ve regretfully never taken the leap into really digging into it. With the announcement of their “Labs” and the API that it provides, green thing officially interests me.

as described at dothegreenthing.com:

“Green Thing is a public service that inspires people to lead a greener life. With the help of brilliant videos and inspiring stories etc. from creative people and community members around the world, Green Thing focuses on seven things you can do – and enjoy doing. Join people from 196 countries doing their green things and making a difference.”

With stories, help, and inspiration around our consumption (gas, heat, electricity, consumer goods, and even food!) – green thing looks to be the homebase for going green, the trendy web 2.0 and now webserviceable way

Lets hit a factsheet (after the turn) about green thing and take this time to credit: The programmableweb.com

green thing FactSheet

• Homepage: dothegreenthing.com
• API Homepage: dothegreenthing.com/labs/homepage
• API Access Control: Open for anonymous pulling of data (stories, green actions, etc). You do need to use their user api to authenticate to add stories and manage the various content on site.
• API Abilities: Get All Content on Site, Comment on Items, Get Lists of Green Actions, Add “Likes” to Content, Manage Stories, Report Content.
• ProgrammableWeb API Listing

I’ve done my classic research again and found a few little gems that green thing has been doing.

Current green thing mashups and projects

• green thing facebook app! – yes, its true. I deleted facebook a couple of months ago, so I’m not sure how glorious it is, but if anyone has an inside look, let me know! This is an official app made by dothegreenthing.com and in a reply to a thread on their forums by what looks to be a staffer, it looks like this was the first encarnation of the green thing api (I guess thats why we see v2.dothegreenthing.com in the urls )
• embedit.me – Video Upload and Mirroring Service. Not really a green thing mashup, but its listed as the first API that the green thing developers made while creating this v2 of greenthing.

Now, I did say that this has sparked a few ideas. Right now, the first things that come to mind are services in a support capacity to the greenthing site itself. I’ll run through some now.

• green thing life stream - your going to hear more about it, and I’m trying to figure out how I want to get into this myself, but life streams are basically an aggregation of your life online. Generally they take your last.fm favourites, flickr photos, youtube favourites, twitter posts etc (whatever services you use to express yourself) and put them into a little stream of events that make up your online life. (freiendfeed is an early adopter of this)

  For green thing, I imagine a very simple system that you insert your green thing id, and your twitter id and it cross-posts. Using a common tag like #greenlife (as can be seen with #tcamp09)

• green thing badges – its bound to happen from the official site, but if your quick you can jump on this now. Give basic updates from your green thing profile with links to stories, comments, etc.etc.etc.
• green thing + kiva.org? – thats right, I posted abunch about Kiva.org’s Person-to-Person lending API last month and I think its about time we bring it back. A marriage between these services could be the final installment to a long road of activism. Poverty + Green Living. Having a site that lent money to people who were making a real attempt to lower their carbon footprint and live a greener life seems like a juste cause.

  What if a small business signed up on green thing and got indivual funding by people who supported their green goals in the business world? Hrrrrrrm….

• green thing + green.cbc.ca – Here in Canada we have had a national program called “One Million Acts of Green”, a website and program whose goal was to accumulate one million acts of green. It is currently at 1.2 million acts of green with a greenhouse gas savings of: 70 MILLLION Kg.

  So how about a marriage of greenthing’s api and a custom api for green.cbc.ca to report a group or a challenges’ stories and progress.

I hinted at the begining of this post that although I do recycle, I am not incredibly involved in the green movement. That being said, and truth being told, I was really into it as a child – I actually went to “Environmental Camp” while my friends were at Hockey Camp. (Yes, I played hockey too, but I sucked)

I know there are tons of people who ARE very green and who live their lives by many of the goals of green thing. Please comment and fill me (and you readers out there) in on what we’re missing. I’ll leave you with some links.

Follow green thing in the socialsphere (some of the ways, they have them all)

• green thing twitter
• green thing Facebook Group
• green thing flickr

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I caught a jquery tweet today that linked me to an interesting little helper bookmarklet called “SelectorGadget”.

“SelectorGadget is an open source bookmarklet that makes CSS selector generation and discovery on complicated sites a breeze.”

SelectorGadget, is a very easy to use bookmarklet that can be used on any website of your choosing (Although someone in the comments DID have a problem with scraping a site that is NTFW )

To get started with SelectorGadget, head over to their humble website, and install the bookmarklet and watch the video. Anyone with experience in Data Extraction (Hpricot or Beautiful Soup – as the website suggests), will immedately see the benefits of this little application.

With apparent support from JQuery, and its open-source repository over at github, I think SelectorGadget will be able to spawn alot of interest within the various Javascript and DOM Selection/Extraction camp’s around the internet.

Some ideas for you guys to dig your teeth into after the fold.

My Forseeable Uses for SelectorGadget and its Algorythms:

1. Speed up creation of GreaseMonkey userscripts(.org) for those of us who rely on JQuery for our javascript prowess.
2. Make DOM Selection in your own Javascript Applications (jquery included), MUCH MUCH easier
3. Dynamic JQuery plugins for data extraction – Make more versitile plugins to manage dynamic datasets.
   • For Example:
     • Creation a plugin that adds dom to specific element types of a page (mp3 player to mp3 links)
     • Generalize the selection of the mp3 links
     • Drop in mp3 player plugin to any page w/out any need to initilize
4. Creation of your own Dapper Engine????????
   • For instance if you could (hypothetically) get jaxer running this javascript selection engine. Then maybe… you could be running a serverside DOM Selector engine with native ajax-scraping abilities…Hrrmm…
5. Quick Ruby Data Extraction & Screen Scraping
   • Hpricot, or better yet scrubyt, OR even better still skimr (the re-factored scrubyt for those of you who have been paying attention)
6. SelectorGadget to phpQuery ? – phpQuery is a dom selector engine for php designed to be a port of JQuery to php. Its pretty good but a little slow for my liking.

The Death of PHP in Data Extraction

Yes, I am calling it. This is not breaking news as Ruby’s scrubyt (and its driving forces WWW:Mechanize and Hpricot), have been dominating the “custom api creation” process for awhile now. Still, php is so common and easy to get up and running its hard for me drop it all together.

Software like SelectorGadget gives me even more reason to move away from php and work on my Ruby development more. As an interim solution (in the interest of time) I imagine myself using Ruby for my data and php for my presentation.

OR, if I can finally get a solid native jaxer server running I could simply use my javascript skills to properly deploy my data extraction javascript applications. (If your a jaxer master, please message me, I’ve tried numerous times with limited success)

Until I am a ruby master (which might take time as I’m learning far too many languages atm), I am going to see what I can hack out of the SelectorGadget engine. Its algorithms might unlock a very cool selector engine for php (aka an improved or refactored phpQuery )

Anyway, I think SelectorGadget has ALOT of promise and I see this accomplishment echoing through a lot of different technologies and software. I know I am going to dig into it and see what I can do. I’ll be sure to report all of my findings to you good people.

Happy api’ing.

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