Still finding more reasons to play with and learn YQL, and following up from my experiment with random numbers, today I implemented YQL support for lipsum.com, a “Lorem Ipsum” text generator.
What is Lorem Ipsum text? The lipsum.com site explains:
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
I made a simple custom data table to access this service via YQL. To use these services, you’ll need to reference the custom table I created, then “select” some random text. The service can create text in a specified amount of either paragraphs, words, bytes, or lists. You can also control whether or not you want each string to start at “lorem ipsum…”, or to start randomly.
For example, to request 5 paragraphs (try it in YQL Console):
use "http://scooterlabs.com/yql/lorem.ipsum.xml"; select * from lorem.ipsum where amount="5" and what="paras";
To request 20 lists (try it in YQL Console):
use "http://scooterlabs.com/yql/lorem.ipsum.xml"; select * from lorem.ipsum where amount="20" and what="lists";