QuoteMonster

A Javascript/jQuery app using APIs

February 2017

“

Click this box for a PERL of programming wisdom (get it?). Click ‘Tweet it!’ to share it with the world.”

—QuoteMonster

About QuoteMonster

The aim of this project was to produce a simple app that drew JSON data from a remote API, displayed it without a page refresh, and gave users the option to easily tweet the content. The app relies on jQuery, AJAX, a programming quotes API, and the Twitter Developers Documentation to achieve these objectives.

I used the free Programming Quotes API by Storm Consultancy to provide the quotations for this app. Although the API serves up the quotes in several different ways, I chose to take single quotes at random for this app. Before displaying the quotes, I converted all quotation marks into single opening and closing quotes, so they would be correct inside the double-quotes built into the quote box.

To build the Tweet window, I followed Twitter's developer docs to create a button that sends a request to Twitter.com to open a Tweet window pre-loaded with the quotation and its author. Due to Twitter's famous 140-character limit, the app checks the length of the quotation before attempting to tweet it. Also, because Twitter expects data to arrive in a query parameter, I had to replace certain special characters ("+" and ";", for example) with escape codes recognized by HTTP.