Finding Your Next Amusement Park Ride with APIs

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Every now and then I’ll wonder if something or another has an API, google for it, and be pleasantly surprised to find that there is indeed an API available. This week that random thought was about ride waiting times for amusement parks. To be fair, it wasn’t completely random. I saw an ad on Facebook for a little display you can get for your home that shows live wait times. Obviously that’s targetted for amusement park freaksfans but it’s a cute idea and something I’d consider. I’ve only recently become a Disney fan (you don’t want to know how much I freak out at Galaxy’s Edge) so I get the attraction. In this case, my googling landed me on Queue... more →
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Using Cloudflare’s Browser Rendering APIs for Screenshots

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I’ve been a Cloudflare fan for a while now, but have mainly focused on their Workers Serverless platform. I was aware, of course, that they did a lot more, but I just haven’t had the time to really look around and explore. Recently I was doing some investigation into "url to screenshot" services and discovered that Cloudflare had this, and not only that, it’s part of a suite of browser APIs that are really freaking awesome. Cloudflare’s Browser Rendering APIs do things like: Get the HTML of a page, but after JavaScript has executed, allowing it to get dynamic HTML Render a PDF to PDF Scrape HTML via selectors Parse out content via JSON schema (I’m absolutely... more →
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Adding CORS to Your BoxLang APIs

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CORS, or Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, has been the bane of my existence at times. Don’t get me wrong, I get the idea behind it. I get why it’s necessary. That being said, I tend to forget about it until I write some client-side JavaScript code that gets hit by it. With that in mind, I thought I’d quickly demonstrate how to build CORS-enabled APIs with BoxLang. It’s incredibly simple, which is good, but you’ll want to keep it in mind when building out your own APIs. What and Why? I’m not going to repeat the full description of CORS available from MDN, but it basically boils down to a security feature in browsers. When executing code on your domain that makes... more →
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Spam APIs in 2024

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I enjoy building API demos so I generally keep an eye out for interesting APIs to play with. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that I had not seen anyone talking about or sharing information about Spam APIs. I may be showing my age a bit, but it feels like spam was a much larger issue back in the early days. It was something you always heard about and worried about but not so much anymore. Much like nuclear war. I did a bit of digging and it turns out Chris Coyler had similar thoughts 4 years ago: "Spam Detection APIs". I thought I’d check out a few myself and share the results. Here, in no particular order, are the APIs I tried. Test Data # Before I looked into any APIs, I gathered... more →
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