Recently ran across this beta tool “Popfly” from Microsoft. Seems like a fun way to create webpages and “Mashups”. Mashups are what I think are fun to play around with. They have created what they call “blocks” and you can drag multiple “blocks” into an area and link some of them together. It is hard to explain until you see it. One thing I really like about this site is their incorporation of Silverlight 1.0. I think this truely demonstrates how Silverlight is going to enhance the rich text experience of web pages in the future.
I put something together to show what I am talking about.
I used two blocks:
- Virtual Earth Block
- Flickr block
First I went into Flickr, added some pictures, then went to the mapping feature in Flickr. This allowed me to associate lattitudes and longitudes to my pictures.Next I went to Popfly and created a “Mashup”.First I dragged the “Flickr Block” onto my Mashup surface. I then clicked the toolbar in the Flickr Block and it brought up the edit screen for the Flickr Block. From there I chose “getUserPhotos” under operations. Then I chose my Flickr username under “userName”. What this is going to do is tell Flickr to use all the photos under my username. When I was finished editing the Flickr Block I just clicked the toolbar again to close it.
Next I dragged the “Virtual Earth Block” onto my Mashup surface. The first step is to “link” the two Blocks together. To do this just click once in the Flickr Block then click once in the Virtual Earth Block. You will see a line get drawn between them to let you know they are linked.
Lastly, I just set some informaiton about my Virtual Earth Block. To do this click the toolbar symbol on the Virtual Earth Block. This brings up the editing window for Virtual Earth. Then, in the defaultZoomLevel, change it to 4. I have noticed that if you are placing your pictures all on one continent that 4 is a good zoom level to show just that continent. If you want to show the whole earth, then keep the default of zoom level 2.
Thats it, you are all finished setting it up. Press the “preview” link to see what you have created. If you want to save your changes than Flickr is going to require a Key. Under the Flickr Block you will see something that says “Missing Key”. If you click on that it will walk you through the steps on how to get that key. You will need that key if you want to click the “save” button (which saves your mashup to your profiles projects)
