APIs can give you much more power but they are often overkill for what people are trying to around here- lightweight social media Here’s a lightweight example of how you can use Google Sheets and the IMPORTXML function to grab quite a bit of data from various video pages with no API or technical skills. […]
Category: Data
Random Stuff I Learned This Week
I’m messing around with some workflows to figure out how I’m spending some of my time . . . and, as a result, spending some of my time on how I spend my time. One of those efforts is trying to get some decent numbers around how my own efforts towards rampages support are going. […]
Community Engaged Learning – Stackoverflow Version
We have two faculty learning communities exploring how technology and the Internet might change how community engaged learning can work. I’ve attended a few meetings and one of the key things I take away from the conversations is that I have a slightly different view of community. It did get me thinking about giving back […]
Read More… from Community Engaged Learning – Stackoverflow Version
Map a Folder Full of Images to Google Spreadsheet
Imagine you have a large folder of images in Google Drive. I don’t have to imagine this as I do thanks to an IFTTT recipe.1 Google tends to be kind of stingy with the kinds of filtering/interactions you can have with files in their folders and we know that if you get stuff in Google […]
Read More… from Map a Folder Full of Images to Google Spreadsheet
findURL – Custom Google Function Fun
via the magical XKCD Fun being a fairly relative term . . . but I’m amused. The Meat You can write custom functions in Google Spreadsheets and then use them like other built in functions. I didn’t realize that. The script below1 grabs all the URLs from a chunk of text. You could add it […]
Grabbing FaceBook Comments – More Primitive Programming
Functional is a kind way to describe this . . . but it’s hard to argue with computers doing tedious work that was previously done by hand. The goal here was to automate the collection of the comments on 300 or so posts from the CDC’s Facebook page so they could be analyzed. Ebola is […]
Read More… from Grabbing FaceBook Comments – More Primitive Programming
Facebook Comments for Research
This is a post about (at least temporary) failure. I should be able to do all this via the Facebook API/SDK but I’m doing something wrong. While I’m learning a decent amount in the land of programming, fundamentally I still suck. With that cathartic self-flagellation out of the way . . . I’m working with […]
Another Google Sheets Tip – Find Non-Standard Characters
flickr photo shared by Lynn Friedman under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-ND ) license We’re still messing with manipulating data in Google Sheets. I hate to think of humans going through and manually parsing things that the machine should do so I’m putting all this out in the hopes of saving someone somewhere some time. […]
Read More… from Another Google Sheets Tip – Find Non-Standard Characters
Scraping Instagram with Google Script
I thought I’d take a stab at using Google Script to capture Instagram data after being inspired by all the great Martin Hawksey has done with the TAGS Explorer. I’m doing something very similar and it turned out to be fairly straightforward to take the PHP I’d written previously and turn it into something that’d […]
Scraping Instagram – Take 3
flickr photo shared by JeepersMedia under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license I started to apologize for writing three posts on this and promising not to do any more but I reconsidered. This is my site. I’ll write whatever I want. Skip it if it bores you or exile me from your feed reader.1 […]