API

It's no secret that meetup.com have raised their prices over the last couple of years. Whilst this doesn't impact some of the larger user groups who have lots of members, it is basically killing smaller groups with no income streams.

I have no idea how tiny groups with less than 50 members can afford to pay £150+ every 6 months and pay for venues, refreshments, hosting space, and all the other things that a small group needs to pay for. That's not a fixed cost either, there's a good chance that meetup.com will increase their prices further.

The local Drupal user group I manager is one of those groups affected. We just don't have the income or the user numbers to afford meetup.com any more. So, after 14 years we have stopped the subscription and the group will disappear from meetup within the next few weeks.

I quite like the end of the year report from Spotify that they call "Wrapped". This is a little application in which they tell you what your favorite artist was and what sort of genres you listened to the most during the year. It shouldn't come as a surprise to me that I listened to this or that, but since I listen to Spotify around 30-40 hours a week I certainly lose track of what my favorite artist was that year.

This years report got me thinking about how difficult it would be for me to generate my own Spotify report, whenever I wanted. Maybe to see who I had listened to the most during the week, or what sort of genres I was into at the moment.

If you've been building websites sites for a while you will realise that no site lives in isolation. Almost every site you build integrates with some form of API, and this is especially the case for the more enterprise sites where data is often synchronised back to a CRM system or similar. Drupal's hook and service architecture means that you can easily build integration points to that API to pull in data.

Pulling in data from an API into a Drupal site means installing an off the shelf module or creating a custom module to provide the integration. What route you go for depends on the integration, but for enterprise sites the API is quite often very custom to the business. I have even seen APIs being built at the same time as the site that it needs to integrate with, which is especially the case for startups and new businesses.

The other day I was approached by a friend (Julie Cheung) and asked if I could create some code that would display a list of last played tracks from last.fm. Julie isn't a PHP developer and so the code I gave her had to be easily understandable so that she could edit it herself if needed. The following code is what I came up with.