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13 Comments

What's an API you wish existed?

What API do you wish you could use but hasn't been made yet?

on February 9, 2021
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      interesting!

      What would be your use case?

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        Sorry, I was half-joking. I thought about creating a directory of IH products, but then I saw they already have one.

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        API for Indie Hackers ))

  1. 2

    check if a given phone number is a valid number and additional metadata about them such as a fax machine(if such things exist) or special numbers etc.,

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      I believe both Nexmo and Twilio have phone number APIs, though I don't think they'll be able to tell you anything about fax machines. They can at least inform you if the number can be dialed or is in the correct format.

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    The one that gives you startup ideas. 😆

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      This is not very hard to build... a lot of ideas are available in the web, collect them, tag them and create a simple api on top of that data. Ofcourse you will have to automate a lot of stuffs along the way.

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    I haven't yet found a api service to check for 404 on a given link.

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      Not sure I understand the need here. You're asking for...

      • An API that provides an endpoint
      • To which you pass a URL
      • And the API then report back the status code?

      If you simply make a request you will get the status code back, along with other information. The API is built into the protocol, so to speak. Why would you need an additional layer?

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        Ah this seems like a simple problem but its fairly hard:

        • What if the page you requested changed
        • What if it returns a 301 redirect? Now you need to check the linked page.
        • What if returns a 200 and spits html back. This html screams '404 page not found'(very common scenario).

        Raindrop has written about this topic:
        https://help.raindrop.io/article/41-broken-links-finder

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          • loop
          • follow_redirects=True
          • 200 is not 404. you can predefine patterns of what this page looks like, but HTML can contain anything, it's not a simple yes/no question like 'is 404'