Data, Maps, Usability, and Performance
Do you need to create API docs for your RESTful API? Want to automatically generate API documentation? Today, I am going to share some free templates that are designed to showcase your API. Good documentation is really important so start with a good foundation. These API resources are simple, clean, leverage best practices, and will make your API users happy.
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As more APIs allow CORS, we can create some really cool integrations without any server side code. Google Maps API is an obvious one but I was surprised to see successful Ajax calls to the FaceBook Graph API which made me think about building and integrating these services. I was scraping FaceBook for Places, or geo locations, so it only makes sense to start with a world map where you can search, click, or drag markers to retrieve any latitude and longitude coordinates for your geo search.
Next, these geo coords are sent to my facebook function that initiates a graph search for places near the provided geo location. The response drops markers on the Google Map, similar to Google’s own Places API and examples. But, I also wanted to visualize this dataset in more details and used the jQuery DataTables plugin to make the API data available for easy viewing, searching, and filtering. You can get more data for a specific place by clicking on an id, which initiates another place API call and drops the JSON response in a modal window with code highlighting.
Google and Facebook for Geo Places on a Map and Table
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Create GitHub Repo with Folder Upload
GitHub has a ton of awesome repositories and it hosts most of the top libraries, frameworks, and plugins. People sometimes ask me to put code on GitHub and today I wanted to look into optimizing that process. It’s not hard to create a git repo, pull it, authenticate, and commit from the command line but it would be great to just have it all work with just a folder upload. If you are working on a project, it probably lives in a folder on your hard drive, so lets create a page where you can upload folders and it automatically creates a repository using the GitHub API.
First, I will pick up from my last post on the Gist API and explain how you can create and add files to GitHub repos with Ajax. Then, I will create an online page that supports repo creation with client-side folder input and API calls with Ajax.
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I am a big fan of SlideShare and automation so today I want to show how you can programatically create a slideshow with JavaScript and upload it to your account with the SlideShare API. I am going to use jsPDF to generate a PDF file from images and text. When the pdf is created, I will use the upload_slideshow API call to upload the pdf into awesome slides on SlideShare. And the slides will be the actual steps to do this. Let’s start.
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I had seen the GitHub API before but never considered that it extends out to Gists, which I use for code samples on this site. In fact, I use a Gist on the bottom for the Ajax code samples that programmatically interact with GitHub using their API to create and modify Gists. First, I will just use command line cURL and then XHR, or more specifically, jQuery Ajax functions. Since Github supports both JSONP and CORS, you can use client side code to interact with the GitHub API.
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This is a continuation from the previous post on setting up Google App Engine with Go and Martini.
Last week, I showed how you can quickly create and launch a project with Google App Engine and Go. I integrated Martini on GAE and today, I will finish the tutorial by actually designing an API to properly respond to requests with JSON. I will also enable CORS and create some functions in GO that will shuffle an array of objects, split the array according to a user provided number, and reorder the array of objects for multiple keys. If we translate that to playing cards, the API will handle shuffling a deck, dealing out the cards to the amount of players provided, and ordering them by suit and numbers. Any remainder of cards based on provided players will go into the kitty. JSON is a popular content type so I will use that and follow the RESTful style of API design.
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Google App Engine is a great platform for quickly developing and hosting web applications. There are alternatives but today we are going to dig into GAE and show how simple it is to get started. I have previously made a few posts on Go and Martini so today we are going to setup Martini on Google App Engine for the Go Language in order to launch an API in the cloud. Martini is a great framework for building a RESTful API and the workflow below will take you through all the steps, from downloading GoogleAppEngine to deploying our Martini API app:
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I was playing with the Pinterest API today and I think it can be quite helpful in gathering some interesting data on websites and pins. One of the things you can do is list the most repinned photos for any domain over a certain time period. Since I have previously talked about the most popular websites on Pinterest, I now want to expand on that and list the most popular pins from the top Pinterest domains. RJmetrics recently did some analysis on most shared Pinterest websites so I will leverage that data for the 5 out of the top 20 domains on Pinterest. I will use the Get the most repinned Pins endpoint to get our results.
Most Repinned Pins for Most Popular Websites on Pinterest
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Since the Google search engine is dominating the internet search market, statistical data about search keywords can be very insightful. I was amazed when I first discovered Google Trends and I still think that it is a very powerful tool for marketers, researchers, website owners, and SEO experts. The tool has expanded quite a bit over the years and now you can do much more than just see the top 10 most popular keywords. Apart from viewing the latest hot searches and the most popular phrases over the last month, you can now see these top keyword trends in a cool visualization. If you select specific keywords, you can compare and chart up to 5 keywords over time and see the top and rising related searches. You can even filter by location, time, category, and type of search (web, image, news, shopping, or YouTube) or compare keywords by location or time range.
Adding to this, Google has added Top Charts which shows you most searched and trending keywords per category and you can filter or segment the data based on any time in the past. There is a ton that you can do with this data but isn’t it really annoying that there is no official Google Trends API? We do have the hot trends atom feed and that gives you 20 trends with approximate traffic numbers and related news items. This would be good for building a little widget but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of serious keyword and market analysis. So, today, I will dig in, sniff some network traffic and figure out what kind of calls are made between the browser and Google servers to provide this trending keyword data programatically.
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With the recent launch of the new Google Maps and my love for maps, I want to dedicate a post and create something with the version 3 of the Google Maps API. Street View is capturing more and more interesting locations around the world and it’s great that Google is constantly enhancing this feature. On top of this, other people are innovating and making things like Google Street Viewer and Hyperlapse which combine Google Street View and WebGL to make some awesome effects. The Google Maps API also supports 45° imagery for certain locations, which is another interesting map type. So, today, I will combine all these map views and create a Google Maps demo that explores geo locations with three different map types: roadmap, streetview, and tilt.