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In the software development world, practice makes perfect. Therefore, we should find as many ways to practice programming as possible.
With free public APIs, we can practice programming by creating apps that use those APIs.
In this article, we’ll look at some practice project ideas that can use some of those APIs.
Statistics Analysis App
The Time Door API is an API that lets us send data to its API and then it can do some basic statistical analysis for us.
Once we pass in some time-series data to it, it’ll return mean change strength, variance change strength.
Also, it detects anomalies, recurring patterns, how patterns change over time, check for critical transition points, and a lot more.
The Unplugg API is another API where we can send in our time series data and then it makes some forecasts about those values in the future.
It’s very simple and doesn’t have as much functionality as the Time Door API, so if we’re overwhelmed with the Time Door API, we can use this one instead.
They both require an API key for authentication, then we can use it as we please.
News App
There’re plenty of news organizations that provide their data via an API.
The Associated Press press provides its media and news metadata via its API.
Also, we can use it to get their election data. We just need an API key to get started.
Another API is the Feedbin API. It’s used to aggregate RSS feeds into one place.
We can manage all our RSS subscriptions with this API. Also, we can get more detailed user information like recently read entries, updated entries, pages, and more.
It requires OAuth for authentication so it’s great to learn how to add authentication with this.
The New York Times newspaper also has a useful API with news headlines and featured images provided for free.
It’s also free and provides us with lots of data about the news, books, media, and more.
For news articles, they only provide the headline, images, and metadata and not the content.
If we want the content, we can pay for the News API. It aggregates data from news sources from all over the world.
It also has a free tier with news headlines, features images, and metadata from new sources from all over the world.
However, we can pay to get access to the content as well. There aren’t that many API that let us access full content even for pay.
All we have to do is to sign up for an API key and then we can get started.
The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom also has an API. We can access news content for free and we can get more if we pay.
Even if we don’t pay, we still get lots of content for free, which includes the text content of the news article.
If we pay for the API, then we get all the content instead of just the text.
Internet Time Machine App
Archive.org’s API always provides us with archives of old versions of lots of websites for free.
And with the API, we can build our own app to display the content our way.
Not only can we use it to get snapshots of old websites, but we can also use it to create new snapshots.
Also, we can use it to get book data like book covers, availability, and get information about book donations.
We can use it without authentication so that we can use it right away.
An App to Summarize the Content of the URL
The LinkPreview API is an API that provides a summary of the content that’s loaded by a given URL in JSON format.
It provides us with metadata of a page like a title, description, featured image, and URL.
To use it, we have to sign up for an API key.
Conclusion
News data is available everywhere. We can use APIs like The Guardian and News API to get full news data and create an app that uses that data to make our own news app.
Also, we can do statistical analysis with APIs easily with some time series analysis and forecast APIs.
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