GoToSocial 0.6.0(rc1) upgrade

Flushed after the success of getting GoToSocial 0.5.2 working successfully, I was about to celebrate with a cup of tea when this post appeared in my timeline about the release of 0.6.0 (Release Candidate 1). Good morning everyone! We just cut the first release candidate for v0.6.0 of GoToSocial: v0.6.0-rc1. There’s a preposterous amount of changes included in this one (we’ll do a proper organized list when we do the release proper)....

November 29, 2022

self-hosting a GoToSocial instance

I like experimenting with software and technology. Many years ago, I built a Laconica instance. Not because I needed a Laconica instance but because I was curious and any knowledge gleaned would be useful. Standard LAMP stack. Same as the WordPress blogging software which I had already built. Plus Laconica releases were named after R.E.M songs by Evan. Similarly, I got an account on mastodon.sdf.org in preference to Twitter because I favour OpenSource software and the underdog....

November 29, 2022

Football Web Pages APEX application

In the last article, we created a simple APEX application fetching data about English football from the Football Web Pages site which provides an authenticated REST API. However, all I really want to do is to quickly look at Kingstonian’s forthcoming fixtures for the next month. Fortunately, there is an FWP API providing that information. Endpoint: https://football-web-pages1.p.rapidapi.com/fixtures-results.json Matches - The current list of matches for a competition/team The following parameters may be set: comp - The ID of the competition (note: one of “comp” or “team” is required) team - The ID of the team (note: one of “comp” or “team” is required) We already have created an APEX report listing all the available Competitions (including the numeric ID values) so it would be useful to have a similar report listing all the Teams....

October 25, 2022

a simple APEX application using REST API

Introduction The last article provided a quick introduction to REST APIs. Now we will use a simple REST API to develop an APEX application using a real world example. Football Web Pages I enjoy watching football (soccer). My local team are Kingstonian FC, a non-league team in South West London. Kingstonian play in the seventh tier of English football. Kingstonian’s players are semi-professional so the players hold down jobs and train and play part-time....

October 16, 2022

introduction to REST API's

Background REST API’s are a popular means of manipulating data. REST API’s use a client-server model. The server is a web server and the client is a Web application or a Python, Perl, Java, .NET, Node.js or COBOL program. REST is an abbreviation for ‘Representational State transfer’ while API is another abbreviation for ‘Application Program Interface’. This all sounds complicated and almost intimidating but it’s not. Database developers have been manipulating data using a client (SQL*Plus) from a server (Oracle database) for many years....

October 6, 2022