🆕 blog! “Are there any open APIs left?”
One of the dreams of Web 2.0 was that website would speak unto website. An "Application Programming Interface" (API) would give programmatic access to structured data, allowing services to seamlessly integrate content from each other. Users would be able to quickly grab data from multiple sources and use them for their own purposes. No registration or …
👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/01/are-there-any-open-apis-left/
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#api #coding
@Edent nope, and that's why everyone is building everything and the Unix tools philosophy has gone to dogs
@Edent
Pwnwed Passwords lookup https://haveibeenpwned.com/API/v3#PwnedPasswords is free and needs no authorisation (unlike the main HIBP API) or you can just download the entire dataset for use locally.
@Edent my favorite open JSON API is the iNaturalist one, we used that for https://www.owlsnearme.com/
@Edent GitHub is worth a mention - a thing I really care about is open CORS headers, so that I can hit the API from my own client-side JavaScript - and GitHub serve *every public static file on the site* with open CORS headers via their CDN, including content in Gists
The GitHub API itself works without authentication for a lot of things, albeit with IP rate limiting
@Edent take a look at the "GitHub repository" tab on https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount for an example of something I built on their API
@Edent Open Meteo, a weather API: https://open-meteo.com/en/docs
@Edent Do you regard #webmention and #microformat as APIs?
@Edent Old enough to remember "Small Pieces Loosely Joined".
I kind of think there are still RSS-Atom interfaces that respond to search queries. Though I'd be hard put to point at them.
It wasn't just standard API interfaces that disappeared, it was also standard return data formats. Damn you, JSON!
@Edent Thanks! 🙂👍 I'm teaching an intro to web dev course this year and was going to make a post asking for nice APIs that students can use in example projects.
Have you seen @tomscott's video on the topic of web APIs? It's a few years old now, but I think it's a good summary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0
@julian
my go-to has always been https://api.chucknorris.io/
@Edent NASA data used to be free and openly available, that was until people started to mirror full datasets (because they could). And this wasn't just some other institute, this was every single grad student with enough god damn disk space. Then the bean counters came in and here we are.
