Codecademy is a platform that provides a way for developers to teach; and would-be developers to learn how to code. It provides course-creation tools, as well as “badges” (awards) for developers when they finish certain exercises.
The great thing about Codecademy’s API track is that it not only teaches you how to code, but it also let’s you learn about a specific API that you might have been curious with in the past (e.g. learn YouTube + javascript simultaneously).
In our effort to improve the way keys are handled in Mashape, we have changed the naming and more importantly the way keys are used in Mashape. This is an important change so we recommend that you read on.
When?
This change is immediate and is reflected NOW in your Mashape account (e.g. Dashboard, Mashape keys, test console, client libraries, etc)
Where?
After receiving feedback regarding the trouble and complexity of generating an authorization hash from your Mashape private and public keys, we decided to change and improve the way these keys are interpreted and generated. One of the problems that arose from generating a hash is when someone intercepts it. It will compromise your Mashape account in its entirety, leaving all your API access open to anyone who may have intercepted the hash.
How?
To address this problem, we have removed the requirement to generate any hash. Instead there will be two main keys for you to manage:
Universal key Testing - used for testing and will have access to every API
Restricted keys Production- used in production, and can be restricted to consume only a specified group of APIs. (In theory, you can create one restricted key for each API).
Both Testing and the Production keys can be re-generated anytime.
Where?
Below are the areas in Mashape where you will see the changes:
Client library (Ruby example below):
Dashboard
Keystore panel
Client library download
Where did my Public and Private Mashape keys go?
To ensure a smooth transition, your original Public and Private keys will still work in your applications. We would however recommend that you start using the new Universal and Restricted keys moving forward.
We would love to hear your feedback. Please email us at support@mashape.com for any comments and suggestions.
After an intense 24-hour coding stint that started 16th Feb for the MusicHackDay SF 2013 at the Tokbox office, we have picked our Mashape category winner, “Nightingale”, for mashing up a bunch of APIs from Mashape, including Text Processing, Musixmatch, and Word Cloud Generator, to name a few. Congratulations to Nightingale developer, Vivek Agrawal, for winning the $500 prize from Mashape! (He was also awarded the best Musixmatch category :)).
Nightingale creates a song playlist based on your tweets. (e.g. I got a bunch of “Flo Rida” songs after Nightingale analyzed my Twitter account). If you want to try it out, you can head over to http://nightingale.aws.af.cm/
Here’s Vivek talking about Nightingale, and Loreto Parisi (from Musixmatch) inviting developers to check out the Musixmatch API.
One other team that used the Mashape / MusixMatch is “Sing Along With Me”. It gives you a “premier online karaoke experience” delivered through the web. This is also one of our favorite hacks because we love karaoke ourselves (haha). It also matches the background visuals with the mood of the song. Nice!
Here’s Yih Sun, Angie, Le Wei, and Ryan walking us through Sing Along With Me.
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Congratulations to all the 66 teams in MusicHackDay! We are looking forward to the next MHD!
In the meantime, below are the UStream demo start times of all the hacks in MusicHackDay so you can watch and jump to your favorite hacks. Enjoy!
Gun.io, a site for developers looking to join awesome companies, has graciously given us the opportunity to guest post to educate developers about Mashape.
You can find our first post here. If you’re a developer looking for jobs, or a company looking for developers, go check gun.io!
I tried tofinish my homeworkthat night. Physics was my cup of tea. It would have been a 5-minute endeavor to compute the gravitational attraction force between the Sun and Earth, but something otherworldly happened that afternoon.
I was sitting by the cafe minding my own business, sipping cappuccino in tiny amounts (to prolong my stay), then this girl came in. The weather was just perfect, with the afternoon sun putting her on a spotlight like she was meant to step on it and just shine. Her face looked familiar, I didn’t quite place it but I recognize it from somewhere. I won’t go into details. Let’s just say that at that moment, I felt like I had already won the lottery. It was weird but I knew I had to do something.
She went up to the counter and stopped abruptly to check the menu. At that point my mind was already giving me a glimpse of what was supposed to happen. I would come up to her and say “They have good cappuccino here, you should try it.”
She’d paused with an astonished expression, and after digesting it in for a bit, will play along, and reply with, “Is that so? Do you work here?”. With that she would smile, and I would be thinking if it was sarcasm or a challenge. I’m not very good withanalyzing words. They get in the way.
“Well no, but I come here once in a while, and go to themoviesafter. It’s justacross the street.”
Shit. Was that too soon? It wasn’t even related. I’ve blown it this time for sure, like everything else.
Snap! She’s into Star Wars. You don’t get these chance occurrences often, no way. Maybe some people do, but not for me. I’ve been holed up in my own world for too long, sipping cappuccino minding my own business. I would have been happy computing gravitational forces between celestial bodies.
“They should have kept George,” she said.
“Pardon?” must’ve been what came out of my mouth. It was a noob moment, I know.
“George Lucas? This Star Wars is being directed by J.J. Abrams I heard. Uhm, sorry you’re probably not into these things.”
So what, I have a poster of a huge Death Star on my wall. Sure, I’m not into these things.
“Well, maybe a little. Say, can I buy you coffee?”
You guys are gonna love this. We now have a Mashape embed button that you can use on your page to link back to your Mashape API profile page.
We even let you customize the button color and icon!
To get your Mashape button, go to your API Profile page and click Admin.
We hope you’ll use the new Mashape button for your landing pages and developer documentation pages. Let us know if you do! We’d love to hear about it - Facebook and Twitter.
(Photo courtesy of ThomasBonte Music Hack Day Flickr set)
Music Hack Day is an international 24-hour event where programmers, designers, and artists come together to conceptualize, build and demo the future of music. Software, hardware, mobile, web, instruments, art - anything goes as long as it’s music related.
Check out these hacks from last year’s Music Hack Day. Do you think you’ve got what it takes? Then register here! We’ll announce our Mashape API partners soon!
We would like to congratulate the PlayAlong team for winning the Mashape category at the recent TVHACKFEST Hackathon @ Moscone Center West hosted by Apps World! Here’s Jason Townes French talking about their game PlayAlong and how he used the Trivia API in Mashape.
According to Jason, he has more games in store for us and he’s looking to add more Mashape APIs in them :) Congratulations again PlayAlong!
We would also like to recognize the following teams that incorporated/conceptualized Mashape APIs in their hacks:
Metamaps.cc/StoryGraph is a discovery platform with awesome graph visualization. In this video, Ishan Shapiro explains what Metamaps is, and how Mashape could be integrated in.
ConnectedKiosk uses a QR Code API in Mashape to connect mobile phones with ads shown on the kiosk e.g. a kiosk showing a restaurant allows a passerby to book a reservation by snapping the QR code which then opens to OpenTable.
Movie Night is an app that helps people find movies to watch using a fun game system. (The team ended up using Mashape’s auto-generated libraries and not the Mashape proxy - we’re just glad we can help ;))
We just released a new section in the API profile page called “Issues” that would allow developers to report an issue or open a discussion with the API owner regarding his/her API.
Developers can open an API issue by navigating to “Issues” on the left-hand side panel of the API profile page, and clicking on “New Issue” button on the upper-right hand corner.
You can then proceed to type in the Title and Description/Comment for your issue and click “Submit” when done. At this point, the API owner will see that the “Issues” navigation panel section will be highlighted in gray, with a number representing the number of issues that are currently open.
The discussion can then proceed with several options:
Developers can “Like” the issue (A useful indicator to API owners that it is a common issue that needs to be addressed)
Developers can add Comments to provide other useful information for the API owner
The developer or the API owner can choose to Close the issue if it has already been addressed. Closed issues can be tracked inside the Closed tab for historical purposes.
Developers can Un-follow the Issues if you want to opt out of the notifications from the comments.
We hope that this new feature will encourage a healthy and robust discussion between API owners and consumers/developers. This will result to better APIs, and therefore a stronger API Marketplace.
As sales people beholden to our clients, we’ve all been caught off-guard at one point when we receive an unannounced call from a certain client or customer. The last thing you want to say is “Who is this?” with a tone reserved for telemarketers. It’s a classic scenario that we all hope to avoid.
Callinize solves all that by telling you who’s calling and providing you contextual information pulled from CRM systems.
Callinize uses several services to pull this information into the app. One of them is the Rapleaf API in Mashape.
Patrick Hogan, from the Callinize team, explains that they can integrate with other CRM systems as well. They are also looking to integrate more Mashape APIs into Callinize.
Again, congratulations and best of luck to Callinize on their road to success!
About Us
We're Mashape, the Cloud API Hub. We provide a world-class marketplace to manage, distribute and consume any kind of API in the world, both cloud and internal, both existing or just born, targeting every developer and organization committed into the internet.
