Week 4 Notes

APIs

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Publishing JSON data

Creating a JSON file

Part of the assignment this week is to publish some JSON data. You don't necessarily have to write the JSON from scratch. If you have data in a spreadsheet, you can convert it to JSON. In your spreadsheet program, export the file as CSV, open the CSV file in Sublime or other text editor, copy the contents, and paste it into this online CSV-to-JSON converter. Then click "Download" or just copy and paste the resulting JSON into a new file and save it with the file extension .json.

If you prefer, you can write JSON in a text editor, or use the online JSON editing tool, JSON Editor Online.

Publishing JSON

Post your JSON to gist. Gist is a service run by github that lets you post code snippets online; you can log in with your github account. Paste your code, click "Create Public Gist", and you'll see that your code has a URL. From there, you can edit as needed. Notice at the top of the text area, there's a button called "Raw" -- that will give you the URL to the plain JSON, which can be used in Javascript. Be aware that the raw version is specific to a particular revision -- if you update the gist, you'll get a new raw URL.

For example, here's the link to my gist with some json text: https://gist.github.com/robynitp/10153952

... and here's the link to the raw version of the gist: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/robynitp/10153952/raw/f3acabec34265c0956ab0082d0759a8611157488/weather_example.json

Paste the link to your Gist (regular version, not raw) on Class JSON feeds.

#####JSON Tools