On March 21, 2011 Fluidinfo and O’Reilly Media announced a contest involving the Fluidinfo API. While most API’s involve extracting data, the Fluidinfo API is writable, meaning individuals or organizations can send information to the FluidDB and interact to some extent with data that’s already there.

API stands for Application Programming Interface which raises some red flags for me, because I don’t consider myself a programmer. Any programming I do is slow and is usually accomplished with reference books in my lap while my hands are on the keyboard. For this reason I counted myself out due to the dearth of programming skills. However, after reading more about it, I realized the API and the contest might not be as complex as first thought.

The pages below outline my progress through the competition so far.

• The contest
• Background info – ideas
• The simple step – a new tag
• The complex step – attack of the foreign editions
• Postmortem – what works, what doesn’t, lessons learned
• Bonus! Now with Search!

EDIT: The date for the end of the competition got pushed back, which left me some time to tinker. While I didn’t plan on doing any coding at the start, I ended up making two basic search engines for Fluidinfo – one that’s limited to O’Reilly books and one that’s not. I’m leaving these pages, so you can see how the project progressed over time. How things appear at the beginning isn’t always how they end up.