Awesome Customization

Awesome Customization is a workspace that shows how you can dynamically pull images, videos, and other media from awesome APIs to create customizable user experiences.

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Inspiration 🤓

I was inspired by Kyle Calica's demo: "Visualizing Open Brewery Data with Bootstrap". His demo gave me a lot of ideas on how I could make an API response a bit more interesting than just some nicely formatted JSON. The Postman Visualizer takes API development a step further and allows me to demonstrate how the response data from an API can be used.

What it does 🏭

The Awesome Customization workspace:

  • Provides a number of API collections that pull media resources from APIs around the web that can be used to create customizable user experiences.
  • Shows how to use each of the APIs and set up the different authorization types.
  • Visualizes the output so that developers and creators have a better understanding of the data being returned and how it can be used.

How I built it 🏗️

I built everything in the Postman web interface and used the browser developer tools to debug and tweak the visualizations. I also read a lot of API docs!

Challenges I ran into 🙄

  • I had little trouble understanding how to manage secrets/keys in a workspace I intend to make public. I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to accidentally share all my secrets and keys with the world. I ended up using variables and just setting the "Current Value" which doesn't get sent to the server.
  • I had trouble getting YouTube videos to embed in the output visualization. I think it is an iframe related issue. I output the embed tags instead so folks can see how the embed tags are generated.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of 🍾

I was excited to see actual images in the visualization output. I think this provides further validation of the API output.

What I learned 📓

I learned about postman features I had never touched:

  • Workspaces
  • Pre-request Scripts (helpful for the Gravatar email hash)
  • Test scripts
  • Visualize
  • How to use variables for Authorization
  • How to use several APIs including: ** Creative Commons ** GIPHY ** Google Fonts ** Gravatar ** Pixabay ** The Noun Project ** Unsplash ** YouTube

What's next for Awesome Customization ⏭️

There are likely many more APIs that can provide some awesome customizations. Freesound has an API that would be cool for creating a dynamic sound-board. 🔊

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