(This post written partly to tease my delightful colleague Charles, but also as a way of thinking about user needs.) During a recent Open Data Café, one of the guests made an entirely reasonable point. An API only method of getting data is elitist. Already having my assumptions tested – are APIs elitist? food for…
Continue reading →
Recently, one of the accounts I follow on Twitter was hijacked. It was turned into a PS5 giveaway scam. The people who hijacked the account changed the name, avatar, and deleted all the previous Tweets. Here’s how I found who the original owner was, and managed to contact them. A Twitter account has a screen…
Continue reading →
As part of my MSc, I’m being asked to think about “digital disruption” – so here are some personal thoughts about the future of transactions with the state. The UK Government has a lot of APIs to let computers communicate with each other. Most of them are department-to-department. For example, the Ministry of Birds wants…
Continue reading →
This blog runs on WordPress. Using their JetPack plugin, I get fairly detailed stats on views and visitors. But, bizarrely, the API is undocumented. Well, sort of… Let me explain: Just Show Me The Code Here’s the API call to get a year’s worth of data about your blog. https://public-api.wordpress.com/rest/v1.1/sites/shkspr.mobi::blog/stats/visits ?unit=day &date=2021-01-03 &quantity=365 &stat_fields=views%2Cvisitors’ Replace…
Continue reading →
One of the things I loved about Facebook was its “On This Day” feature. There’s something delightful about seeing what nonsense you were talking about on this day a decade ago. Twitter doesn’t have anything like that. So I built it. Introducing – Twistory.ml Stick your @ name in, hit the big button, and you’ll…
Continue reading →
After writing about how to use MoneyDashboard’s unofficial API, the good folk at Moneyed told me about their officially supported API! So here’s a quick review & howto guide. Moneyed is a slightly strange service. I think it is designed for companies to give as a benefit to their employees. But you can sign up…
Continue reading →
Yesterday, I wrote up how to use the MoneyDashboard Classic API. Read that blog post first before reading this one. MoneyDashboard have launched a new “Neon” service. The API is a bit more simple, but authentication is harder. Here’s a quick guide to the bits of the API that I found useful. I’ve lightly redacted…
Continue reading →The OpenBanking specification is brilliant. It allows you to aggregate all of your financial accounts in one place. You can give read or write access to apps and services. Magic! API access is restricted to registered financial institutions. That’s good, because it puts up a barrier to entry preventing dodgy companies slurping up your data…
Continue reading →
One of the most requested Twitter API features is now available – the ability to get replies to a Tweet as a thread. Long time readers know that I’ve long been a fan of Visualising Twitter Conversations in 2D Space. But up until now you had to use horrible hacks to get the data. As…
Continue reading →
Mostly notes to myself. My solar panels have an open API. But it’s only available if I’m on the same network as the Fronius inverter. I can connect my system to https://www.solarweb.com/ so I can access it anywhere in the world – if I have the right password. SolarWeb has an (optional) guest mode. You…
Continue reading →