Beautiful hackery
While I had Matthew in my clutches, I made him show me around the API for They Work For You. Who knew that so much could fun be derived from data about MPs?
First off, there’s Matthew’s game of MP Top Trumps, ‘though he had to call it MP Fab Farts to avoid getting a cease and desist letter.
Then there’s a text adventure built on the API. This is so good! Enter your postcode and you find yourself playing the part of your parliamentary representative with zero experience points and one hundred hit points. You must work your way across the country, doing battle with rival MPs, as you make your way towards Sedgefield, the lair of Blair.
You can play a Web version but for some real old-school fun, try the telnet version. This reminded me of how much I used to love text adventures back in the days of 8-bit computers. I even remember trying to write my own in BASIC.
For what it’s worth, Celia Barlow, MP for Hove, has excellent pesteredness points. I made it all the way up to Sedgefield and defeated Tony Blair in battle. My prize was the source code of the adventure game in Python.
Ah, what larks!
There’s another project that Matthew works on that I find extremely useful. He has created accessible UK train timetables using the data from the National Rail site, a scrAPI if you will. This is where I go whenever I need to plan a train journey.
The latest feature is something that warms the cockles of my heart: beautiful, hackable URLs. If I want a list of trains going from Brighton to London, I can just type:
http://traintimes.org.uk/brighton/london
It handles spaces (or pluses or underscores) too:
http://traintimes.org.uk/brighton/london victoria
The URL can also be extended with a departure time:
http://traintimes.org.uk/brighton/london victoria/14:00
My address bar is my command line. This is the kind of design that makes URL fetishists like Tom very happy.