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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
php
News, by Colour
I had a play around with the API and put together a really simple breakdown of news stories grouped by different colours - topics, articles and quotes relating to 'Red', 'Blue', 'Green' etc. It's at http://colours.isitbedtime.com.
It's written using PHP, and I put together my own wrapper built on top of the Zend Framework's Rest_Client with SimpleXML wrapping the responses. A combination of the Daylife API's simplicity and the Zend Framework code made accessing the data really easy, and what's returned is structured in a way that makes it really easy to make use of. I've made use of the Articles, Topics and Quotes searches and I pull in the thumbnail images for related topics.
In terms of the app itself, I was trying out different search terms to see what kinds of results were returned when using keywords that aren't the subject of the article but are just mentioned in it. I found quite quickly that for the most part colours did this. Some are better than others in showing this; Brown is really bad for it, as all the articles related to people with the surname Brown but the other colours show it pretty well.
One thing that could be improved, either in my code or preferably (because I'm lazy, and it's not a trivial problem to solve) in the API, would be some way to help eliminate stories that are duplicates - not that they're the exact same story, but that are covering the same thing. A lot of the time different perspectives are a good thing, but in the context of what I've done it's not desirable - newly discovered purple tomatoes being able to cure Cancer is dominating that topic at the moment, for example!
