An unofficial API

What will you build with our API?

Adventurous souls might feel dissatisfied by our range of tools, wishing instead to chart their own course amidst the turbulent seas of code. We salute you tinkerers! And to guide you on your journey we offer an unofficial API (Application Programming Interface) to supply you with liberal quantities of machine-readable data freshly-scraped from the Trove newspapers database.

All manner of queries, directed through clean and tidy urls, are ready to do your bidding. Familiar machine dialects, including JSON and XML are provided for your coding convenience.

Go! Explore! And make!

0

The new API-powered future

By
tim
– 15 April 2012Posted in: Huzzah

The long-awaited Application Programming Interface (API) to Trove is now available. Huzzah! The frustrations of broken screen-scrapers will soon be a thing of the past.

But this glorious new future will not come without cost. WraggeLabs will henceforth be embarking on a process of code consolidation and renewal as we overhaul all our Trove products to take advantage of this machine-readable goodness.

The first fruits of this process can be enjoyed in the new fully-web-driven version of QueryPic. Instant graphs! No downloads!

More such wonders are to come, but bear with us dear client, as it make take some weeks or months to fully update our wares. In the meantime, it is unlikely that any development of pre-API versions will be undertaken.

We should also announce the imminent retirement of our Unofficial API. It has served us well, but it’s time has now come. Farewell, old friend.

Tags: , ,
0

More Trove scraper drama

By
tim
– 6 March 2012Posted in: Calamity

Once again a minor change to the Trove newspapers code (from <i> and <b> to <em> and <strong>) broke my scraper and the tools that depend on it. Fortunately @erochest was quickly on the job and has submitted a fix. If you’re having problems, please update scrape.py from the repository.

I will update the unofficial API shortly.

Tags: , ,
0

Trove Tools calamity

By
tim
– 13 December 2011Posted in: Calamity

I am sad to report that due to a minor change in the Trove website (a <strong> tag was changed a <h1>!) most of my Trove tools are experiencing difficulties.

The good news is that the fix required is small and I’ve updated the scraper that powers most of the tools.

If you’re using the command line version of the Query Harvester you can download the latest code and be on your way. The Search Summariser wasn’t affected, but there’s a new version available for your perusal including some extra features (these will be documented anon).

The Zotero translator for the newspapers database has been updated and submitted to the Zotero repository. Once it has been approved the translator will be upgraded automatically.

I believe that the Unofficial Trove API is unaffected. If you believe otherwise, please let me know.

And now the bad news…

The Query Harvester GUI will need to be rebuilt. I will try and do this as soon as possible, but I can’t make any promises. Bribery and flattery might help.

My apologies for any discomfort or anxiety. I always say that screen scrapers are inherently fragile. It’s part of the game. But it’s still extremely annoying when something like this happens. :(

Let’s just look forward to an official Trove API which should ease our pain considerably.

Tags: , ,

No Comments

Start the ball rolling by posting a comment on this article!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>