Api

As open data is gaining momentum an increasing number of organizations are thinking about ways to make their data available for others to use. Here are some thought on how to approach design issues when making open government data available. TL;DR See if it is possible to publish your open data as file dumps instead of building advanced API:s that force entrepreneurs to integrate their apps with your infrastructure. A fictional background It was supposed to be a regular day for John at the server facility at the government weather agency. But when he came in to work that morning his colleague Mike was in a panic. -“Look! We are in the middle of a DDoS attack. The API-server is flooded and the database server is on it’s knees. The meteorologists can not work” . John started looking at server logs. Between 7 and 8 a.m. there was a sharp increase in traffic. Loads of API calls were made from a lot of different IP:s. Then, all of a sudden server load decreased and everything was back to normal. ...

I have been experimenting with various search options for the eutveckling.se site for a while. Google Custom Search is nice and very fast, but the number of ads appearing in the search result page makes it difficult for users to separate result items from ads. (Update: I am sticking with Google Custom Search until I figure out how to get Yahoo search to present proper excerpts). I am a fast reader which comes with the tradeoff of missing important information sometimes. Skimming through the terms for using the API I was a bit disappointed at first. That was because I was only reading the first column in the table that lists the previous terms of use. Oh well. The second column that lists the current restrictions (or rather lack of restrictions) makes it clear that Yahoo search is very easy to get started with. It is almost so that you start wondering where Yahoo will make money from providing a service like that. ...

Like many before me, I was searching (unsuccessfully) for a decent twitter client. There are many, but most seem to be ad sponsored or based on a rather hefty framework like AIR (which by now, I guess, has been silently installed on my computer anyhow). Update: This project is now deprecated and Twitter has removed basic authentication. Custom apps have major implications for usability so I decided to roll my own. I wanted to try out Fluid, the Prism-like app to contain web apps in their own process/window, to see if it is possible to build a complete open source ad-free twitter client in a single web page only using javascript and HTML. ...