Details:
This widget uses 3 yahoo pipes, one to get general course information by term and department, it then uses a 2nd pipe to get the course description and the full course title instead of the abbreviated title used in student services listing and then replaces the title where appropriate. Finally, although incomplete, it uses a third pipe to gather comments about the course from Twitter. I had planned to allow you to post your comments in the catalog as well but ran out of time. It also uses a Zembly service (they're equivalent to pipes) to proxy data because the student services website inexplicably disallows all HTTP traffic and will only let you get data by POST request, neither of these 2 things current work in Yahoo Pipes. For the UI, I'm using Zembly, and lots of JQuery. The data seems more valuable then the widget you could use the data to post dept listings on dept websites or filter it even more and let professors list what they're teaching on their websites through the feed. Finally, it takes so long to assemble all the data in pipes that Zembly occasionally times out, I tried to do it in multiple service calls but Zembly had a bug that prevented that.