Under the Googview Hood

I recently made an update to Googview, my first web project. The new functionality automatically updates the Googview background to current Bing search backgrounds from around the globe. This exposed me to a few new web technologies that I thought I would share here.

Search Functionality:

• Made using Google Custom Search Engine. This tools has a wizard that makes it very simple to create custom Google search tools.

Bing Images:

• Images are taken from Bing's global sites and put into an RSS feed by Long Zheng at istartedsomething.com
• This feed goes into Yahoo Pipes and is modified to make the media asset URL the 'title' of each item.
• A simple PHP script on the Googview page runs on load, takes in the Yahoo Pipes feed using MagpieRSS, parses the media asset url and writes it down to the page as HTML.