My first foray into coding with someone else’s data would probably have been when I created some php and a cron job to automatically block-and-report-for-spam any Twitter account that tweeted one of three specific texts that spammers were flooding on the #eqnz channel. I really don’t want to work with Twitter’s API, or more specifically with their OAuth stuff, ever again.<\/p>\n
So my first foray that I enjoyed<\/em> was with the Christchurch Metroinfo (bus) data<\/a> – specifically the real-time bus arrival data<\/a> (link requires filling out a short terms and conditions thing but then the data’s free under CC-BY license). For a long time I’ve used this real-time information<\/a> to keep an eye out on when I need to leave the house to reach my stop in time for my bus. But if I’m working in another window and get distracted, or traffic suddenly speeds up, I can still miss it. I wanted a web app that’d give me an audio alert when the bus came in range.<\/p>\n Working with the data turned out to be wonderfully easy. A bit of googling yielded me information about SimpleXML<\/a> and I knew enough PHP to use it. There was an odd glitch when I tried to upload my code, which worked perfectly fine on my computer, to my webserver with a slightly older version of PHP which for some reason required an extra step in parsing the attributes ECan use in their XML. But once I worked out what was going on, that was an easy fix too.<\/p>\n Then I did a whole bunch of fiddling with the CSS and HTML5, and the SQL is a whole nother story; and then I uploaded the source code to GitHub; and eventually even remembered to cite the data, whoops.<\/p>\n So now I have:<\/p>\n online, and I’m already starting to think about what other open data projects might be out there waiting for me.<\/p>\n (And now that the development phase is over and I’m using the thing live, I think my cat is starting to recognise that when this particular bird song plays, I’m about to leave the house.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My first foray into coding with someone else’s data would probably have been when I created some php and a cron job to automatically block-and-report-for-spam any Twitter account that tweeted one of three specific texts that spammers were flooding on the #eqnz channel. I really don’t want to work with Twitter’s API, or more specifically […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[15,6],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":304,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions\/304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n