Origin Story We were looking to pull in live weather data for a eco-related design contest that VCU Qatar is hosting. I found a free API for weather but wanted a way to use it via javascript and not expose any secrets. That led to the script below. Many APIs have query strings that require […]
Read More… from PHP Middleware for Keeping Your JS API Secrets Secret
We wanted to be able to know whether people signing up for Ram Pages were faculty or not but didn’t want to add fields for them to fill out. VCU has an online phonebook with faculty emails in it but there didn’t appear to be a way to hook into an API. But you can […]
Ordinarily it’s pretty easy to get the featured image from the WordPress API. You just have to remember to add the _embed element like so https://bionicteaching.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?_embed But maybe there’s some reason you don’t want to set the featured image but want to get the first image from the body of the post. This chunk of […]
Read More… from jQuery & the WordPress Rest API – 1st Image as Background
I have many little robot scripts busy saving data to Google Sheets. Here’s one I made based on a little comment from one of my kid’s teachers. It goes to a very kind URL that returns the data structure at the bottom of the page. http://api.wunderground.com/api/YOUR_API_KEY/conditions/q/VA/Richmond.json It’s a pretty nice starter script for anyone wanting […]
I found myself in a strange situation where I needed to know if a page had a child. Natively the WP API lets you know if a page has a parent but not the reverse. First I had to write a function that writes some data to a custom field if a page has a […]
Backstory Driving into work I was listening to NPR and they were interviewing Nikki Giovani a poet from Virginia Tech. In high school I was one of those people who really suffered reading the The Red Wheelbarrow and other non-rhyming poems. They irritated me in the same way people seem to be annoyed by White […]
Read More… from Code as Poetry, Time as a Variable – Options in the Ether
We’re trying out a new site idea for the online digital sociology program. Once again, Matt came up with an idea that really got me excited and I started wandering around trying to figure out how to make it work. At some point I found CensusReporter.org. This is a pretty amazing site that is a […]
The request was that we do something interesting with the random screens we have scattered around our area. It seemed like it’d be easy to make a little full-page player for a YouTube playlist with some lightweight overlays to emphasize the connection with our department. Handling the videos displayed via a playlist makes it easy […]
Read More… from YouTube Full Screen Player Page from Playlist
In trying to get a better handle on how we’re going to manage our plugins in the future, I found the API for the WordPress.org plugins data. Not like they were hiding it but I’d not seen it before.Consider me Columbus– absent the genocide, slavery, and other terrible things. Replacing *slug* in the following URL […]
Read More… from WordPress Plugin Health Dashboard (Early POC)
Since we’re making channels in Slack via our project creation, it made sense to archive them when the project was completed. In projects (this particular post type) we have a custom field for the start date of the project and one for the end date of the project. Step one is to check on updates […]