PhotoShelter has their own API and I’ve been meaning to play around with it for awhile. I’ve never worked with an API before, and my JavaScript knowledge is “functional” at best, so this meant I’d be facing a learning curve. To get up to speed, I visited Codeacademy and started their JS course. I made it about half way through before I got restless and wanted to start working with the API.
Figuring out to use jQuery to pull in data from the API was, well, way more difficult than I thought it would be. Most of the tutorials I found focused on making just one call and acting on that information. Ok, that’s great, but what if I’m trying to make several calls to gather information from a number of different endpoints, some within loops, and build something with that?
My sights were probably set a bit to high. So instead of my intended project, I decided to start with something simpler. When I was logging in and out of my PhotoShelter account during testing, I thought I might as well figure out how to do that via the API. I’m so glad I decided to go this route, because the joy of actually creating something that worked made up for all the time I spent bashing my head into the keyboard during my post-Thanksgiving “hackday”.
After getting the basics down, I added some CSS to the page to make it look nice. On the suggestion of a friend at work, I added a link that would let a user jump straight into their Beam site builder. The end result?