Periodic Mashup

Every so often I stop work and stick my head above the parapet and see what the rest of the Web Developer community is doing, and every time I do I’m amazed by some of the ideas and applications that are being built. They aren’t always useful but who cares; the technology is available so why not try it and push the boundaries a little.

The first application I really like is Mashupbreakdown by developer Benjamin Rahn. Mashupbreakdown is a visual representation of the samples used in the latest album by Girl Talk called “All Day”. That in itself is very cool, but where does it get the sample information from? Well that’s the really clever part; it gets it from Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has a page for the “All Day” album that contains all the sample information used in each track. Mashupbreakdown scrapes this page and and visualises it. Since Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, if you spot a mistake / new sample you can easily update the page information and the application with change accordingly!

At the moment it only shows one album but there’s no reason the application can’t be adapted to handle more albums. Benjamin has a post on his blog appealing for more breakdowns so I’ll be checking back with the site now and then to see if any other breakdowns have appeared. Great work Benjamin.

The second application that really caught by eye is the Periodic Table of Elements by developer Josh Duck. When I find a site I like, I immediately do a “view source” (don’t all Web Develepers?) to see how it’s been built. The Periodic Table of Elements takes any URL you pass it and tells you what HTML elements were used on the page. It’s basically a prettified / simplified version of view source! The application may not be that useful but kudos to Josh for taking the time to build it. Definitely one of those ideas that I wish I’d thought of!