Bin day is the most magical time of the week! Children of all ages cry "Which bins is it?! Oh! Which bins?" Is today recycling day? Or green waste day? Or humble landfill day? Should my food caddy go out? Gosh! Who can keep track? I mean, obviously I could look at my calendar. Or […] Read More
Update! The source-code for this app can be found at https://github.com/edent/TweeView Many years ago, I created a threaded conversation viewer for fledgling social network App.net. It was a unique way to flow through a conversation without having to be constrained by the linear vertical scroll of the typical web browser. App.net died - and I […] Read More
This is a curated list of APIs which do not require usernames, passwords, access tokens, signing, accept-headers, or anything more complicated than sticking a URL in a browser. (This is an update to my post from two years ago.) When I introduce people to the concept of using RESTful APIs, they immediately get how powerful […] Read More
Here's a quick way to display how many times a WordPress post has been read. For this, you will need: A blog running WordPress. The JetPack plugin installed. The ability to edit your themes. Here's the snippet of code I'm using to add "This post has been read 12,345 times". I'll explain how it works […] Read More
I'm really enjoying driving the BMW i3. I'd love to have it tweet its driving efficiency, or upload its location to my server, or let me turn on its air-conditioning when the temperature gets too warm - there are a hundred interesting things to do with the car's data. The official app has some of […] Read More
In the glorious past, Amazon had an API for interacting with its "Wishlist" service. Not any more though. So, here's the inspiring story of how a rag-tag band of adventurers brought it back from the dead! Several years ago, Justin Scarpetti created a tool to extract data from an Amazon wishlist - the imaginatively named […] Read More
Go take a look at this tweet https://twitter.com/edent/status/650948940431511552. You can't - I deleted it! I've been looking at how to track politician's deleting tweets, when it occurred to me - is there any way to prove that a Tweet ever existed? It's possible to automatically take a screenshot of a page, but screenshots can easily […] Read More
I've been looking for a way to programmatically take screenshots of websites. Most of the solutions I've found won't work on headless servers, require complex libraries to be installed, or cost money. So, what do we do when faced with a knotty programming problem? Hack it! Google has a "Pagespeed" service, it allows any webmaster […] Read More
Last year, I wrote about how to extract Location History from Google. Once again, Google have changed their URLs to make it even harder to get one's current location out of their data-greedy hands. It used to be the case that Latitude gave that information - but they killed it. Then they promised it in […] Read More
Twitter, as part of its never-ending quest to alienate users and appease the rich and powerful, have shut down Politwoops accounts. Politwoops monitored politicians' Twitter accounts and noted when they deleted a tweet. Most of the time deletions were done for the same reason we all deleted content - mispellings, broken links, etc - but […] Read More