In A Row

Google's AJAX APIs Playground is an awesome new tool recently released by Google. It allows you to browse through their various APIs and view examples. This is a great way to see what the Google APIs have to offer and get a quick example of each.

Even better, each example can be executed, modified and re-executed right on the page. The final source your create can be copy and pasted, and each API has a link to the documentation.

Definitely head on over and check it out. I follow various Google developer blogs, but I was quite suprised to see the breadth of their API offering. Graphs, maps, search, blogging and more are all included, with great examples and an excellent interface.

As an example, check out this incredily simple way to add a scrolling RSS ticker to a page. This will grab the provided feed, and rotate the articles inside the #content div on the page. You'll want to check out the full example to see the needed javascript files and provided stylesheet.

google.load('feeds', '1');
    
function OnLoad() {
    var feeds = [{
        title: 'In A Row',
        url: 'http://inarow.net/index.rss'
    }];
    
    var options = {horizontal: true};
    
    new GFdynamicFeedControl(feeds, "content", options);
}
     
google.setOnLoadCallback(OnLoad);