Since the third installment of the introductory “Working with APIs” series (also: parts 1, 2), I’ve been thinking about how to wrap up the series. I wanted to show examples of coding interfaces to APIs—in fact I even said that in this installment “I’ll show you some nifty tricks that involve server-side programming,” but there’s a lot to cover between pulling data from query strings or modifying attributes of widgets and using server-side scripting to do custom work.

Instead, I’m going to wrap up this series by talking about why I keep harping on the use of APIs and knowing how things work: the web is a platform. This is not a new idea. It is, in fact, the first point of Tim O’Reilly’s “What Is Web 2.0″ article from 2005:

Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn’t have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2....

When Jason Jones wrote about Google SideWiki a few weeks ago, my first thought was “What about Reframe It?” Others (I heard) thought, “What about Diigo?” The following week, Brian Croxall posted “Writing in the Internet’s Margins”, which talks about CommentPress and also mentions digress.it.

No matter the tool, one thing is clear: more than a few people are hankering for a ubiquitous end-user commenting system for the web. Not group annotation of documents born in or uploaded to the web such that they live within a particular system (see: Google Docs, Co-ment, etc), but a specific service layered on top of the existing, independent web content. Sure, this layer and the accompanying freedom will result in comments that range from profane and inane to brilliant and life-altering, but hey—that’s people. And people have been hankering for this type of service...

After Amy recently wrote about how social media led her to Prof. Hacker, I was reminded that social media led me to graduate school in the first place. Without a doubt, I would not have started graduate school—nor would I be finishing, I don’t think—without social networking. In this post I will talk about what social networking has meant to me, from the perspective of a graduate student.

The title of this post is “Mentoring Graduate Students Through Social Media” not because it’s a how-to for faculty, but because for me social media has been my default method of receiving mentoring. If you’re reading this as a faculty member and you have a presence online, please recognize that you are probably mentoring students without even knowing it. For my fellow graduate students, recognize that there are plenty of faculty out there who have something to teach you.

I had a...

If you’re reading this online, chances are good that you are using a web browser to do so. You could be using an RSS feed reader, but if you are, it is probably a browser-based reader. And, chances are good that the web browser you are using is Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, as these two browsers are the market leaders in terms of usage among the general public. For many people, the installation of Internet Explorer with their operating system works just fine for them—or they are at institutions/organizations that disallow the use of anything else. For others, fine-tuning one’s own set of productivity tools means picking a primary web browser that best suits their needs in terms of processing speed, memory footprint, web development standards compatibility, and overall flexibility. In other words, is it fast, does it show things correctly, and can you...

In Working with APIs (part 1), I talked about the concept of the API, why you might want to work with APIs, and what you will need to get started. In this second installment of the “Working with APIs” series, I’ll discuss instances of pulling data from an API without server-side programming knowledge. We will leverage APIs available from Google Developer Resources to retrieve results based on information sent solely via a query string.

Even if you didn’t know the term before now, I’m willing to bet you have manipulated a query string at some point in your life. A query string is the part of a URL that contains data that is passed to the script indicated in that URL—like all the “extra stuff” that causes line breaks in bad places when you copy and paste that URL into an e-mail. If you’re crazy geeky (like I am), you try to read query strings and figure out how applications are ...

Following on Ethan Watrall’s recent post, Finding the Best WordPress Themes for your Academic Needs, my intention was to write a short post about finding the best WordPress plugins for your academic needs. But that’s difficult to do when “academic needs” is a really broad topic, and your level of access to installing plugins may be limited.

For instance, are you working with a blog just for yourself? If so, do you host it on your own domain or at WordPress.com? Or, have you created a blog for your class, and given all your students access to it? Or, are you (and your class) part of a campus-wide blog initiative à la our friends at University of Mary Washington, or are you hooked up with the folks at Edublogs? And then there’s the question of your own comfort with adding files to your server and modifying template files (if you have that access), or even just working...

This is the first in a series of ProfHacker 101 posts on working with APIs. Coverage in this post includes an introduction to the concept of the API, why you might want to work with APIs, and what you will need to get started. Posts in the not-too-distant future will include practical examples both of pulling and pushing data from or through an API, and of course handling the results that are returned.

There is no single Application Programming Interface, nor is there a single programming language or method of access through that interface. The developer of a particular application or service purposefully creates a way for users to access the core functional framework or data stored within that service. For example, with Google Maps you can create custom maps including points on the map that contain additional information about the location; with Twitter you can archive search...

I am a serious computer user, but I haven’t owned a desktop computer for years. Since 2002, I’ve owned what are known as “desktop replacement” laptops—those with 17″+ displays that weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 to 10 pounds. They’re not lightweight, but they’re certainly portable when I’ve needed them to be. However, when netbooks hit the shelves in 2007 or so, I was immediately intrigued. An ultraportable computer with the power to run a typical suite of office applications and graphics software, plus connect via wired or wireless connections, plus have a long battery life and it didn’t cost a billion dollars? Sign me up!

In January 2008 I bought an Asus Eee PC 4G, and then in November of 2008 I bought an Acer Aspire One. The links in the preceding sentence are a little misleading, as in the last year both companies have shot past the specs...