Story-telling
I've been playing football since I was a child and always felt attracted towards this sport. However, due to my studies I had to move around and thus distanced myself from it. Now the only solution for me is to check online what the score is and look to find a resume of the game online. However, thanks to my creative technologist class I've thought of a new solution: "What if I could automatize the appearance of the scores directly on my social medias?". Like this I wouldn't need to go and look for the score and the resume!
API discovery
That's when I discovered API. API a.k.a Application Programming Interface is a way to transmit information from two different servers through a website for example. Thus, I've developped my own API that would through a JSON database transmit 3 different informations:
Once those informations are gathered in my database, my API will automatically tweet them under the following format:
As you can see here, I just need to enter the different values to post a tweet without much effort. If this task was automatized it would save me a lot of time and probably not just me.
How does it work though?
As I've said before, an API is "a set of functions and procedures allowing the creation of applications that access the features or data of an operating system, application, or other service." To create my API I used the service of ifttt.com and first selected the webhook API that I coupled with the Twitter API. I linked both of them to my account in order to manage where the information appear.The webhook API enabled me to trigger the first action, you could call it the initializer or request that will trigger a reaction from your API. He is the one in charge of communicating with twitter and sending the information. Twitter's role as the receiver is to publish or transmit the information he has received.
Give it a try!
You want to try it out? Enter your values and go check on this account whether it has been published or not!
Check this out!
This API can be transposed to a lot of different use! You can watch this video for example that will show you how a similar API was used to tweet everytime the SNCF trains were late!