51–60 of 82 posts
They (Ycombinator) should implement 'mark as favorite'. There are so many similar tools included in the comments that I'm writing this comment just to have a quick shortcut to find the thread in future references.
This is a really clever idea. So simple and almost-obvious, yet it's the first time I come across this. Genius. Particularly like the fact that REST APIs are pretty easy to start with providing GET access to resources, but get messy when you start doing POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH etc. In this case, it's read-only by definition. That must make things so much easier. I can anticipate people asking for update access in fu…
Actually there is a company out there called https://www.ragic.com/ . Not exactly same but similar.
But if this is the case, why would the devs choose to use this over any number of CSV or XLS parsing libraries? You can write a simple web server that takes a spreadsheet as an upload, and then parse it to CSV, in less than 50 lines of code. The CSV reading APIs in any language are very easy to use and parse to native data structures, and I would argue maybe even easier than using an API like this.
What is your value proposition to devs in this scenario? Or I missing an entirely different use case?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need to put up some examples of what can be done by this service. Something visitors can interact with without registering is ideal to convince them to register.
There's an example API created with the service here: https://sheetlabs.com/#/services/doc/ACME/getDomain This is linked off the front page, but could certainly be more prominent (as another commenter said)
In fact I do that for many small business clients of mine which don't want to deal with databases for things like their product catalog and pricing lists.
Additionally you get version control, busier sites get the google doc scraped X times a minute as to not reach the request limit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's an example API created with the service here: https://sheetlabs.com/#/services/doc/ACME/getDomain This is linked off the front page, but could certainly be more prominent (as another commenter said)
I stared at that for 10 minutes trying to find the spreadsheet. I assume there is a spreadsheet backing it? You should actually show people the spreadsheet - just seeing an API description without demonstrating that it runs off a simple spreadsheet almost kind of defeats the whole purpose of the service!
But I don't think showing the spreadsheet in the API docs is so useful; the idea is to present a clean API to the users, and they don't even need to know that the data was originally from a spreadsheet.