My project is reliant on several API's, like Twitter and Youtube for example. Recently, Youtube deprecated their old API, and it caused issues with my team's iPad app.
We could have stayed ahead of the change if we were paying attention to Youtube's announcements of the upcoming deprecation. But alas, we were not and the idea of staying up to date with all of our dependencies manually(browsing the web) seems exhausting and inefficient.
I have found the following tool to help notify when changes occur with external library dependencies, https://libraries.io. However, this does not help with API dependencies.
Besides checking the API source webpages every so often, I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on how to stay notified and up-to-date with news regarding updates to a specified list of external API's?
After some time looking at different options, I have found a solution that is not perfect, but seems to work best at fitting this need.
Solution Description
This solution uses a combination of Twitter, Google Scripts, and website blogtrottr.com. I am creating a twitter list of reliable dev handles that often post updates on new API. For example I made a list that contained #twitterapi and #YouTubeDev. Used Google Scripts to create an online feed out of the twitter list. Then used blogtrottr to email me every time that feed gets a new posting.
Steps to Implement
Create a twitter list of reliable handles that often post about updates to their API
Create an RSS Feed from that Twitter list. The details for how to do this can be found here.
Plug that url that you get from Google Script into blogtrotter.
I did find some other ways to do this, but so far this is the only solution that was 100% free!
Related
I am trying to use Keywords Planner programmatically, through its API.I came across Generating Targeting Ideas, which pretty much summarizes the use. When I visit Get Started, it states
Try the new Google Ads API—which has the latest Google Ads features. The AdWords API is in maintenance mode and not being actively developed.
I visit Google Ads API, where I cannot find anything related to the Keyword Planner.
Has someone any idea if the planner is available through the new API, or do I have to use the old one?
Thanks,
Alexios
I'm currently working on converting an old Adwords cron job to the new Ads API. While I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, the old TargetingIdeaService has been replaced with a new KeywordPlanIdeaService (see https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/migration/services).
You can find examples for KeywordPlanIdeaService here:
https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/samples/generate-keyword-ideas
Pay careful attention to how the code formats each selector field and using a helper class to format language and geotargeting codes. It's not the most intuitive way of passing paramters.
I am working on a data mining system and one of the requirements is it being able to perform the analysis without the use of API. Is there a way to download the Twitter database (or a big part of it, at least) and work with it locally?
There is a paper about creating corpora from twitter. It is called “TWORPUS – An Easy-to-Use Tool for the Creation of Tailored Twitter Corpora”. I recommend to read it because it also covers licensing issues etc. They also provide there code on Github.
In fact, you cannot download the twitter data dumps directly. I can download single tweets and stored them in a corpus. But, it is also not allowed to share that data. Therefore, the authors built the Tworpus client to create private twitter corpora.
APIs are the official way of getting Twitter data and they work really well so it is not comprehensible why you do not want to use APIs. The web scraping is a work around but not recommended, in addition you would like to get a big part of it, so I do not think you will be satisfied with it. You can also buy the data from Gnip.
I would like to monitor users' page visits and clicks in my Rails app to make recommendations. My questions are:
Is there a Rails gem for this, or Google Analytics is the standard? If latter is true, then how should I link a page visit to a particular user profile?
It is typical in Rails to have a section in application.html.erb, which is shared for all pages. If I add Google Analytics pageview tracking code to in application.html.erb, will it be able to track all individual pages?
There are other ways, but the vast majority probably use Google Analytics. Several gems exist that help you integrate with GA to get at the data. See here: https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/Web_Analytics.
Based on your first question, it seems you may want more insight than GA can provide. I've used ClickTale (http://www.clicktale.com) and Woopra (http://www.woopra.com) before, to good effect. This article lists several other alternatives, too - notice the high marks for Clicky: http://imimpact.com/web-stats-alternatives-to-google-analytics/.
Google Analytics (and almost all of these others) will take care of your second question automatically whenever the user loads a new page, since it keyed by URL. That means that, although you put the GA script code in a single place, each unique page is tracked individually.
If you have AJAX requests that change that page without changing the URL, you'll need to dig in to the GA script API. Essentially you'll need to push a new url (possibly with a # in it) whenever you want to track an AJAX-driven link/button click. See here: http://davidwalsh.name/ajax-analytics
I am biased, but I would recommend checking out impressionist, if you need to integrate the page views into the app in real-time. With analytics you will always have some lag time and you are also relying on an external dependency. Impressionist is good if you need this kind of control, but if you are just looking for simple metrics and don't need to pull them into the app, then analytics is probably the way to go.
Check out Ahoy, at https://github.com/ankane/ahoy. With just a few lines of code in your app, you can track page views and tie them to user accounts.
You can further customize Ahoy to track custom events, both the client (with JavaScript) and server.
Ahoy does not depend on any third-party services.
I would like to build a web application that tracks some user defined search terms in real-time and provides a real-time visualization. http://www.monitter.com/ is an app I've found that is similar in its requirements. What is the appropriate API to use for it? Initially I thought the streaming API was the obvious choice, but the limitation of one concurrent connection means that I can only track one search term at a time(with one user account). I could get around this by making multiple user accounts, but that seems like the wrong approach.
I looked at user streams but the language for that API seems to be more geared towards desktop applications.
So, what is the most best API for my use case? Thanks.
Actually you can track up to 400 keywords/terms via one streaming API connection.
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-api/methods#track
Depending on language you are using there are multiple interfaces you can use.
If you are using PHP, then I can suggest Phirehose as it works quite well and has multiple examples for different usages scenarios included.
http://code.google.com/p/phirehose/wiki/Introduction
Whats not there - when processing received tweets you will need to figure out how to match which tweet corresponds to which keyword/term because twitter streaming API gives all matching tweets in one stream.
Investigating further using Firebug, I found that monitter.com simply polls the REST search api every second or so on the client side. This is what I ended up doing as well.
I'm using Twitter's OAuth for my app (DroidIn)
To my dismay I can't find any way to track who and how often is using the app. Searching Twitter for "sent from DroidIn" does not yield any results. I suppose I can call some sort of counter app from my code but that doesn't seem to be fair to my users. Any ideas or suggestions?
It seems that yet again I have to answer my own question. After some investigation and feedback from question posted on Google Twitter developer group it seems that for now there are no stats easily accessible or available. Said that I found 2 interesting things:
You can search Twitter using source:yourapp switch. For example you can try this query
android source:API
There is very exciting streaming API from Twitter. I have a short write-up in my dev blog.
But if you want some actual stats there's no other choice today but implement it as part of your app. There's one more possibility if you have some sort of web-based interface you may want to use Google Analytics to trigger some Google javascript while submitting the update. I'm trying that right now and may end up with article in the blog