Terence Eden’s Blog
The social network service "Mastodon" allows people to publish posts. People can reply to those posts. Other people can reply to those replies - and so on. What does that look like in the API? Here's a quick guide to the concepts you need to know - and some code to help you visualise conversations. […]
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This is a mixture of lament and how-to guide. Suppose you've reviewed lots of books. It's pretty easy to generate a link to let people buy the book at Amazon or any other online store. But how do you link to a user's local library? You can't. There is no "search every library in the […]
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M'colleague Charles has introduced me to the most spectacular phrase - "Time To 200". That's a measurement of the length of time it takes a new user to go from signing up to your API to getting their first HTTP 200 response. Think about the last time you started using a new API... Fill in […]
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(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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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