DEV Community: Vikram Sharma

Setup MySQL Database for WordPress

Vikram Sharma — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 08:24:26 +0000

Here are the steps for setting up a database for WordPress on a Ubuntu server(Assuming MySQL in already installed).

Log into mysql using root
''' sudo mysql -u root'''
Note: On new Ubuntu version password is not required.
Create a database.

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS wordpress DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

Or use UTF8mb4 if you want emojis.

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS wordpress DEFAULT CHARACTER SET UTF8mb4 collate utf8mb4_bin;

Create a User

CREATE USER IF NOT EXISTS 'wordpressuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

CREATE USER IF NOT EXISTS 'wordpressuser'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

Grant privileges to the user

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'wordpressuser'@'localhost';

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'wordpressuser'@'%';

5.

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

6.

\q

Nuff said.

10 Image SEO Tips for Devs

Vikram Sharma — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 07:11:36 +0000

As devs we don't care about SEO. But the client does. Almost all clients I worked with want their web-apps to be SEO friendly. Every time I reach that stage of the project where I have to make the images look "snack" to Google I have to do a Google search. So this post is a reference to save my future self the trouble of Googling. Here is a list of features a web-app must have to make the image SEO friendly.

Option to name the image - The image should have a relevant name. There should be an option naming the image at the time of uploading it.
Option to add alt text - Helps the screen readers.
Option to add a caption
Option to add a title - For sitemap (see point number 7)
Format conversion to JPEG, PNG, and WebP
Image resizing - Option for resizing the image to different widths. This will help the web-app to serve responsive image (see point number 9). Defaults used by Wordpress are a good starting point. Wordpress resizes every uploaded image into the following formats
6.1 Thumbnail 150px by 150px
6.2 Medium - Longest size is resized to 300px
6.3 Medium Large - Resized to 768px wide
6.4 Large - Longest size resized to 1024px
6.5 Full - Original sieze
Images should be added to image sitemap.
Minify SVG files. https://github.com/svg/svgo
Serve responsive image by using srcset.
Lazy load images - Very important to follow Google's guidelines

Dictionary APIs

Vikram Sharma — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 13:29:24 +0000

Some time back I worked on a educational app. The app was targeted towards non native English learners. The app used a dictionary api for suggesting synonym, and antonyms. Finding a good dictionary API was the first step in this process. Here is a list of dictionary apis I found useful.

Dictionary API

Get words definitions, associations, difficulty level, sentence examples, synonyms.

Oxford Dictionaries API

Get word definitions, example sentences, parts of speech, and many more.

Urban Dictionary API

Urban Dictionary is an online dictionary that provides definitions for slang words and phrases, based on the crowdsourced information.

Word Dictionary API

Next up is Word Dictionary API developed by Twinword. Twinword develops multiple APIs for analyzing and understanding human inputs and online behavior patterns.

Recipe APIs

Vikram Sharma — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 13:18:38 +0000

I recently created an app for searching Jain Food recipes. Jain food is cooked without onion, garlic, meat, or eggs. My app uses a food api to search and return a relevant recipes. I evaluated many recipe apis and found the following apis to be good for creating recipe based apps.

Spoonacular API

Spoonacular API makes it possible to search more than 330,000 recipes from across the web. Spoonacular API allows developers access over 365000 recipes using this API developer can search through thousands of these recipes using natural language queries. It employs an API Key, OAuth 1, OAuth 2 and Other/Custom authentication model. It is a single purpose API with a RESTful architecture. Supports JSON, response format and JSONP, URI Query String/CRUD request format.

Edamam

Edamam stores all the world recipes in a central database allowing users to easily search through. Edamam API allows developers to integrate recipes and faceted recipe search into their application. It employs an API Key, App ID and Other/Custom authentication model. It is a single purpose API with a RESTful architecture. Supports JSON, response format and JSONP, URI Query String/CRUD request format.

BigOven API

With over 3.3 million registered members, BigOven allows users to create grocery lists, import and share recipes and analyse the nutritional levels of recipes. BigOven API allows developers to access over five hundred thousand (500,000) free recipes. Providing advanced searching and sorting functionalities. It employs an API Key, HTTP authentication model and is a single purpose API, with a RESTful architecture. It supports XML response format and JSONP, URI Query String/CRUD request format.

Webknox

Initially starting as a research project in the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and the University of Technology Dresden. Webknox now provides now provides access to more than 100,000 recipes. WebKnox Recipe API allows developers to integrate advanced features like classifying recipes, finding similar recipes, and price breakdown. WebKnox Recipe API is provided as a REST API using OAuth 2.0 for authentication and authorization. It supports XML, JSON response formats and URI Query String/CRUD request format. The API uses HTTP (over SSL) protocol, the HTTP GET is used to retrieve data and HTTP POST is used to create, update or delete data. Usage of HTTP PUT and DELETE is not allowed.

Google Geocoding API Overview

Vikram Sharma — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 13:07:39 +0000

Google Geocoding API is part of Google’s developer APIs that allows developers to translate between human-readable location addresses to location coordinates. For example, your office address can be converted to its geographical location coordinates, defined in latitude and longitude. This is called geocoding. This API also supports reverse geocoding wherein a location coordinate pair can be converted to its approximate location address. In this article I will present an overview of Google Geocoding API.

Google Maps Geocoding API has a freemium pricing model, so you can opt for the BASIC subscription and make 500 API calls per month.

Endpoints

This API has two endpoints

GET Geocoding
GET Reverse Geocoding

The API also returns the details of address components, contained in the address_components key, starting from the street name, all the way up to the country name.

If you interface this App with the Google Maps Geocoding API’s ‘Geocoding’ endpoint, then for the address shown in the app screen, you will get this result.

You got the location coordinates of the customer which can be saved for future navigation purposes. You can also verify this coordinate on Google Maps to confirm the address.

Dark Sky API Overview

Vikram Sharma — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 13:00:27 +0000

Weather prediction is complex. There are umpteen parameters to track, whose permutations and combinations lead to thousands of possible outcomes. Thankfully, there are APIs that abstract away all that complexity behind the scenes. In this overview I will cover the basics of Dark Sky API.

Dark Sky Weather API is an easy to use weather API to get instant weather predictions. It supports both current and historical predictions.

API Endpoints & Parameters

This API supports two endpoints

GET Forecast

The “Forecast” endpoint fetches the latest weather prediction for a given geographical location pointed by a latitude and longitude coordinate.

GET Time Machine

This “Time Machine” endpoint is similar to the “Forecast” endpoint. In addition to the latitude and longitude, it accepts a timestamp to retrieve the historical prediction.

Optional Parameters

Both endpoints support optional parameters to fine tune the prediction responses from the Dark Sky Weather API.

lang - The ‘lang’ parameters returns the data in your preferred language. You can check out the supported languages under the “API Details” tab. This parameter is not available for the “Time Machine” endpoint.
extend - The ‘extend’ parameter is used to return extended results for the interval forecasts. In the case of a value ‘hourly’, the API returns the forecast with extended prediction for the next 168 hours (7 days).
units - The ‘units’ parameter is used to select a specific unit for the weather parameters. The “API Details” tab has more information on the supported units and their interpretation in the returned response of the API.
exclude - Finally, the ‘exclude’ parameter is used to omit one of the data blocks from the API response, either “currently,” “minutely,” “hourly,” or “daily.” It also accepts a comma-delimited string containing more than one data block.

The requests cost $.0001 each. The API offers a free quota of 100 requests a month.

Free Weather APIs

Vikram Sharma — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 12:50:49 +0000

I am a compulsive maker who loves creating side projects. But the sad reality is that many of my ideas don't see the light of the day. So it is important for me to keep costs under check. Developing an app is not free. It takes time and resources. Deploying is costlier. I am a Rails developer, and I deploy my apps on Digital Ocean and Linode. Rails 6 apps need a $10 server to deploy. Some costs can be avoided and free APIs is one of them. I am creating a weather app and I am using a free weather api in my development process. I researched many weather apis which are either free of have a free tier. Here is my favorite ones.

Open Weather Map - 100 requests/day Fast
Dark Sky API - 100 requests/month
Weather by Weatherbit - 150 requests/day
Weather 2020 - 1000 requests/day - Good for development phase. Latency is a killer.
Weather by Location API - 100 requests/day
Visual Crossing - 500 requests/month

Top News API

Vikram Sharma — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 12:21:36 +0000

News is one of the most searched keywords on google. 16.6 million searches are made with this keyword every month. Big opportunity? Only if you intersect this opportunity with another idea. Let's say I want to show only a particular category of news. Or how about an app which learns to customize the news feed. In fact there is an app which made millions by customizing news. To make a news app the first thing we need is a News API. Here is my list of top news apis.

Bing News

Bing News is a Microsoft-owned news aggregating service that displays the most recent news stories on the web and mobile devices. The Bing News Search API allows developers to send search queries to the platform and receive comprehensive results of the latest news, interesting articles, trending topics, and images sourced from around the world. The query results can be filtered by topic, publisher details, local news, and other searchable metadata.

Web Search API

The Web Search API by contextualwebsearch.com allows you to tap into the search engine’s innovative indexing technology and integrate news, images, and other search data into your applications.

Vegan News API

The Vegan News API is a simple API that returns a list of latest vegan-related news sourced from multiple sources around the world.

Bloomberg Market and Financial News API

Bloomberg is a popular platform that provides business news, financial information, market analysis, and other insightful data from around the world. It uses advanced technology to deliver up-to-date news and analytical data to assist businesses and individuals to make influential decisions.

News API

The News API is a simple API that allows you to search several news outlets from around the world. For example, you can use the API to know the trending stories in the BBC News, new articles published about a product, or a company reviewed by a blog recently.

Top Movie APIs

Vikram Sharma — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 11:47:01 +0000

I am a movie buff and love movie trivia. APIs help third-party applications to easily integrate with large movie sharing platforms and create some cool apps. Here is my list of top Movie APIs. I evaluated movie APIs on the following:

API features
Data format
Price
Ease of Use

IMDB

IMDb is the most authoritative information source for movie, TV, and celebrity content, trailers, casting updates, photos, trivia, industry news etc. are always constantly posted on the platform. IMDb API allows developers to query information about films, actors, and characters. Other important pieces of movie information like Release date, Runtime, Genre, Directors, Writers, Actors and Awards can also be accessed using this API

uNoGS

uNoGS stands for unofficial Netflix online Global Search, this platform enables users to connect to Netflix and access information

Entertainment Data Hub API

This API is currently maintained and managed by Internet Video Archive (IVA). This API allows developers to access metadata from video streaming platforms. The API uses HTTP methods and can return data in JSON format.

Google Translate API Tutorial

Vikram Sharma — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 11:36:43 +0000

Google Translate is a powerful NLP language translation service. Formerly, it was available only as a web app to detect and translate between languages. However, Google Translate is now also available as an API. Google Translate API supports over a hundred languages.

An Overview of Google Translate API

The API is simple. It has two endpoints, “detect” and “translate”. As the name suggests, one is for language detection and the other is for translating from one language to another. It has a free quota limit of 50 API calls a day. Beyond that the cost os $0.05 per API call.

Test Drive!

Language Detection using Google Translate

The first endpoint is “detect”. Select the endpoint and hit the “Test Endpoint” button with the default inputs. The default input for the ‘q’ parameter is set to a text in English. The API response returns a JSON object with a key “language” whose value is set to ‘en’ which is the ISO 638 code for English. You can try the API by setting the ‘q’ parameter with any other language from the list of supported languages.

Language Translation using Google Translate

For translation, select the “translate” endpoint and choose the ‘q’ and ‘target’ parameter, as shown. As evident, you are translating the text “Hello, world!” into Japanese. Hit “Test Endpoint”, and you should see a response within a few seconds. You can verify the translated text contained in the “translatedText” key of the JSON response by feeding it into the Google Translate web app or any other online service. You can further explore the optional parameters defined for the “translate” endpoint.

Of particular interest is the ‘model’ parameter, which accepts a value of “base” (as default, also interpreted as blank value) or “nmt” to select the underlying machine learning model to use for translation. You can try translating the same text by using both the options to see which one results in more accurate translation.

Apart from that, you can specify the format of the input via the ‘format’ parameter. By default, you pass plain text for the ‘q’ parameter, as you have seen in the example above. However, you can also pass the value as ‘html’ to indicate an HTML input text. This is a nifty feature when you want to translate a scraped HTML document from the web. In this case, you directly pass the HTML formatted data from the HTML document instead of extracting the text from HTML and passing that as plain text.

The ‘source’ parameter specifies the source language, which is set to ‘en’ by default. Since the Google Translate API is pretty accurate at detecting the language, you hardly ever have to set this.

References

Top Weather APIs

Vikram Sharma — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 11:25:53 +0000

Weather APIs have come a long way. Today, Weather APIs give detailed information beyond just temperature, precipitation and humidity, but also UV index and pollution levels. Time series data lets you discover trends and patterns, and plan events based on weather conditions.

These APIs can also be a useful resource for disaster management, as some come with built-in alerting and notification mechanisms on a global scale. Here are my top weather APIs.

The OpenWeatherMap API

The OpenWeatherMap API was established in 2014 by a group of engineers and experts in big data, data processing, and satellite imagery processing. The API returns current weather, historical weather data, and forecast details.

Dark Sky API

The Dark Sky API is a robust API that provides comprehensive weather information about any place in the world. The API returns a wide range of details, including the current weather conditions, a minute-by-minute forecast for the next hour, an hour-by-hour forecast for the next 48 hours, and a day-by-day forecast for the next week.

The Weather API

The Weather API gives you access to lightning-fast data to meet all your needs for up-to-date weather information. With the API, you can get accurate historical, current, and forecast weather data about any location around the world.

The Simple Weather API

The Simple Weather API is an easy-to-use API for getting the current weather for several locations around the world. The API has made weather information easily accessible to everyone.

The Weather 2020 API

The Weather2020 API is a popular, long-range weather forecast API offering comprehensive forecasts of up to 12 weeks. It was developed by the famed meteorologist Gary Lezak. To enhance its accuracy, the API uses the powerful long range weather model technology known as the LRC.

Let me know what you think of the weather APIs in this list. Happy hacking!

(Unofficial) API's for Instagram

Vikram Sharma — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 10:36:12 +0000

In 2018, Instagram shut down its public API. Meaning, third-party apps can no longer access the API from Instagram without permission. Third-party apps now need to be approved by Instagram before they can access the API.
Source Hubspot

What is Instagram

For those dwelling under rocks, Instagram is a Facebook-owned social networking service mainly used for sharing photos and videos. It’s one of the most popular social media platforms in the world; as of October 2019, it averaged more than 1 billion monthly active users.

Because of Instagram’s popularity, there are several unofficial Instagram API (Application Programming Interfaces) that have been created to assist developers to integrate its features into their applications.

I evaluated several Instagram APIs based on the following criteria:

API features Features that makes the API stand out.
Price Cost of integration and free tier.
Ease Ease of implementing and consuming the API.

Here are the results (Drum roll!)

Instagram Brand Analytics API

With the Instagram Brand Analytics API, you can see your brand’s top rated posts and other helpful information, enabling you to tell what people think about your offerings. You can use the API to search for all comments from a particular post or search for the trending posts about your brand. It’s the API you need to gauge the sentiment of your customers on Instagram.

Easy Instagram Service API

With the Easy Instagram Service API you can get an Instagram post by shortcode, get Instagram profile by username—including follower, following, average like, and last post—and get a list of Instagram posts by Instagram ID.

Hashtagy

With the Hashtagy – Generate Hashtags API, you can get a comprehensive list of hashtags based on your keyword. If you provide a keyword, the API will automatically generate related hashtags that you can use to increase interaction on the Instagram platform as well as on other social media sites. Furthermore, the API allows you to get related hashtags fetched directly from Instagram.

The Gram API

The Gram API provides a wide range of Instagram tools you can use to enhance the capabilities of your application. With the Gram API, you can retrieve user highlights list by username, retrieve user avatar by username, retrieve user stories by username, and search users by username. The API will assist you to easily grab the information posted publicly on Instagram and increase the engagement of your app’s users.

Instagram Facebook Media Downloader API

The Instagram Facebook Media Downloader API allows you to download any media from both Instagram and Facebook. With the Instagram Facebook Media Downloader API, you can easily download photos, videos, and other media from Instagram and Facebook. Consequently, you can use the downloaded media to stimulate your audience’s attention, increase your brand’s visibility, or improve your content’s quality.

I hope you find these APIs useful. Happy coding!