An API for printers and their cartridges. Please share your thoughts

totalink.co.uk

9 points·popasmurf··8 comments

Please put the entire db on a torrent site, api is cool but not all that accessible. Why should beta access be needed? Not really in the spirit of freedom of information? Thanks.

An API will ensure that is it up-to-date, though.

Last updated August 20th so not sure about that.

An index would be nice in any case. Fuzzy searching, etc. The API is too specific at the moment and will be hard to hit the right printers.

Thanks for the comments!

I do have an update planned, I didn't anticipate the current amount of attention to be honest.

It'd be amazing if you listed the price too for the cartridges. I'm sure you could make some money with a sortable list and affiliate links to buy printers based on cheapest price per printed page. What do you think?

I don't think it's something I'd implement at the moment. Certainly if it was requested more I could contact a few suppliers and roll it out slowly across a few areas however.

I haven't yet decided upon a direction to take it to be honest.

Using an API key with an online demo that uses an ajax response and exposes the demo API key is probably not the best idea...

extra touch: pretty format the JSON response from the "try it yourself" lookup

Also, allow more fuzzyness in the query maybe. For instance, "IP4000r" returns OK, but "IP 4000 R" (spaces) doesn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com