Nathan shows how simple it is to create a basic REST API for an existing Django app, as he has done for his great new site, Readernaut. Visit site »
For future reference. ;) Visit site »
A nice-looking API for adding heat maps as overlays on a Google map. Visit site »
A Django template tag implementation of OEmbed, the afore-mentioned API for getting embedding URLs from media sharing sites. The tag was written by Eric Florenzano, and was brought to my attention by Justin Lilly. Thanks, guys! Visit site »
Leah Culver announces a new open standard for getting the URL to embedded content via an API endpoint. Smart. Currently supported by Flickr, Viddler, Qik, Pownce, Revision3 and Hulu. Vimeo and Blip.tv are working on implementations, as well. Visit site »
Google is now serving copies of popular Javascript libraries, including Prototype, Mootools, jQuery, and Dojo, to help with caching. Nice. Visit site »
Dan, Justin, and Rob roll out a big new feature for StrawPoll—the ability to run your own Twitter polls. Clever stuff, using the Summize API. Nice job, guys! Visit site »
Authentic Jobs now as a publicly-available API! I’ve been beta testing this for a while (it’s how I’m showing job related to the content of my blog entries on each entry’s page), and it works great. So, if you’ve got a clever idea for how you could repurpose the job, company, and geographic information at AJ, go register for a key and get to coding! Visit site »
I was checking out the Yelp APIs for an entirely different reason tonight when I noticed they have a neighborhoods API. I don’t know how new this is, but I was under the impression that urbanmapping was the only freely available neighborhoods API (it’s the one I use for geocoded content here on jeffcroft.com). At least for Seattle, Yelp’s neighborhood list doesn’t look as complete (or at least as granular) as urbanmapping’s. It’s missing such common neighborhoods as Lower Queen Anne, South Lake Union, and Interbay (I would imagine queries against Yelp’s API for Lat/Lng pairs in these ‘hoods just return the larger regions of Queen Anne, Downtown, and Magnolia, respectively). I’ll stick with urbanmapping, but it’s nice to know there’s another choice out there. Visit site »
Similar to their charts API, Google offers up a static maps interface, whereby map images are served up directly via nothing more than a URL and some parameters. Neat. Visit site »
Jacob Kaplan-Moss has put together pretty much the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Can’t wait to play with this. Be sure to check out the example page. Sooo nice. Visit site »
You sort of knew this would happen with Brad Fitzpatrick joined Google, but I certainly didn’t expect it to be this soon. Awesome — can’t wait to see where this goes. Visit site »
My former co-worker Matt Croydon cleverly looks under the hood of NFL.com’s in-game update Flash app, and finds it’s powered by JSON-formated versions of the data — meaning it’s there for the taking. Makes me wonder how many “accidental APIs” are out there, if we check out the source XML and JSON files for various Flash widgets. Visit site »
Jason should blog more often. I mean, he’s good at posting links, but anyone can do that. When he actually writes something of his own mind, he can be downright brilliant. Visit site »
Although you can make it work with most any Python development setup, it is optimized for use with Django. Nice. Visit site »
Twitter’s API doesn’t subscribe to its own privacy mechanisims. In other words, all those for-friend-only tweets you’ve been sending are viewable by anyone using an API app. Whoops.
Am I the only person who has been generally unimpressed by twitter as a web service? Nevermind the fact that I just don’t get very interested in the purpose of the site, but the service itself has largely sucked. The site is sometimes painfully slow, the API is constantly unresponse (I use it myself to collect friends’ twitter status, and I get error e-mails all the time from my script saying the API URL wasn’t responding), they’ve public aired out their dirty laundry with Rails and it’s scalability (or lack thereof), and now they didn’t even bother to make the API care about privacy?
I respect Evan Williams and always thought Blogger and Odeo were quite well-done — but Twitter just seems like it’s made by the same bunch of amateurs that are responsible for MySpace. I’m sure they’re great people, but it sure seems like they have a lot of trouble with their application.
Update: It appears this report was incorrect. Rather, the lack of privacy exhibited in some Twitter API apps have been the fault of those apps, not Twitter itself. I still stand by most of what I said, though. Twitter just seems to have more problems than it’s worth, to me. Visit site »
Jeremy picks up on Richard’s machine tag ideas (which I linked yesterday) and implements them on his blog. I should do this too — it would fit nicely with the other Flickr API stuff I’ve been doing. Visit site »
I think Flickr’s machine tags are a great idea, and Richard’s got some nice ideas on how to use them. I’d love to see the same basic machine tag format used on other web services, so as to become some kind of a standard. Good stuff. Visit site »
The “Hot Captcha,” in which the system pulls photos of nine people (men or women) from hotornot.com and requires you to pick the three “hot” ones in order to pass the test. Freaking brilliant. Visit site »
Stuart Colville gets his feet wet with Python by building a simple Twitter client. Fun. Visit site »