I was reading this article and thinking “gee, 1980 sure was a good year for music”.
So I wanted to list all the albums I had from 1980. And then I discovered that I lacked the release year for about 1300 of mah records.
Fortunately, discogs.com has a nice API, so I wrote a tiny, tiny Emacs library for interfacing with it.
And now I can play all the records from 1980! Except that discogs didn’t identify about 300 records, so I have to do those manually. Like an animal!
But the reason for this blog posting is just to beg, nay plead, nay ask, everybody that writes documentation to include fucking examples in their API documentation. The discogs API 2.0 documentation includes a lot of the particulars, but not any examples on how to fucking actually compose the fucking REST fucking URLs that you have to fucking use.
Fuck.
And they don’t really specify this explicitly anywhere that I could find, either.
So here’s an example search URL:
http://api.discogs.com/database/search?type=master&artist=Grace Jones&release_title=Warm Leatherette
I hope that helps, Interwebs.