I earned my first internet money. And I did it fully dressed in a regular office.

Recently, someone posted my API website on Hacker News. The post stayed in third place for about 36 hours. As a result, over 30,000 visitors flooded to the site in a short period of time.

Me? Excited. Of course, my server can handle this. After all, my website is hosted on a trendy cloud hosting service that automatically scales with the traffic. And the costs? They scale too. Panic.

In a hurry, I set up an ad slot. $250 for 30 days. It was gone in 5 minutes. Then I added a second one: $1,000 for 30 days. That one was gone in half an hour too.

The server costs are covered. And my website is being spread across the internet. The biggest industry newsletters, indie bloggers, and Italian IT companies are all writing about it.

The traffic only slightly decreases in the following days. And I start thinking about an ad concept for the future. I go ahead and set up a third ad slot.

That one’s still available.

At the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons (FHGR), our students are engaged in creating data stories—simple websites that tell compelling narratives through data. To achieve this, they need reliable public data sources that provide real-time data, often accessed via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). But where can one find quality public data sources?

While the internet is full of resources listing thousands of public APIs, their quality is often inconsistently checked, if at all. Consequently, many of these data sources become outdated, no longer publicly available, or cease to be free.

To address this issue, I developed freepublicapis.com—a web app that lists free public APIs. What sets it apart? All APIs are tested every single day and ranked based on stability, error rate, and latency. If an API stops functioning, it is promptly removed from the site.

Currently, we have over 100 APIs listed, covering a wide range of categories for students and developers:

• Weather: Get real-time and forecasted weather data.
• Public Data: Access open datasets from governments and organizations.
• Transportation: Information on public transportation systems worldwide.
• Finance: Retrieve market data, cryptocurrency prices, and financial statistics.
• Health: Access health-related information and data services.
• Entertainment: APIs for movies, TV shows, music, and more.
• Environment: Data on air quality, climate, and environmental conditions.
• Sports: Real-time sports data, including scores, statistics, and schedules.
• Gaming: APIs for game data, including trivia, character info, and game stats.
• Food & Drink: Recipe databases, nutritional information, and more.
• Art & Culture: Access to art collections, museums, and cultural data.
• Lifestyle: APIs for fashion, home, and lifestyle content.
• Animals: Data on pets, wildlife, and related content.
• Development: Tools and resources for developers, including testing and prototyping APIs.

Does your company or city offer exciting public datasets? Add your favourite API to freepublicapis.com and help us expand our repository of reliable public data sources.

Don't want to pay $35 for sending out a few dozen emails a month? Me neither! Follow this step by step guide to downgrade to Mailgun's (very well) hidden Pay-As-You-Go plan

1. Go to the Billing section in Mailgun or click on the big red Upgrade button (which will also take you to the Billing section).

2. In the Billing section, click on the cog next to the big green Upgrade button. Then click Unsubscribe.

3. You will be asked once again, if you're really sure to unsubscribe. Yes, we are! Unsubscribing may take a while.

4. After unsubscribing, you should see something like this. If you don't see this dialogue, try reloading the page where you pressed the red Unsubscribe button.

5. Confirm by looking once again at the Billing dashboard, that your downgrade worked.

Did I just save you $400 a year?

I installed Ghost CMS on a Digital Ocean Droplet using the (probably not yet famous) One-Click-Installation. Using this method, my blog was up and running in minutes. However, I quickly realised something was off, because no users could sign up and no emails were sent.

What they don't tell you in the documentation is, that you need to configure your web-server (not only Mailgun), in order to be able to sign up new subscribers and send emails.

First, verify your Domain with Mailgun

1. Sign up for a Mailgun account: Go to https://www.mailgun.com/ and sign up for a (free?) account if you don't have one already.
2. Add and verify your domain: Follow the linked guide below to configure Mailgun for your domain. This process requires adding DNS records to your domain registrar.

Setup ghost to send out newsletter emails with Mailgun

There are two types of emails in ghost. Transactional emails & Newsletter orBulk emails. Transactional emails are mainly used for Sending the admin invite,Sign in/Sign up emails, etc. We have a blog post SMTP Setup to send outtransactional emails. Configure SMTP For Outbound Emails (Ghost SMTP S…

Visioun Updates.Salehin Khan

Verified? Let's go!

1. Don't skip the last step of the guide above, and add your Mailgun configuration in your Ghost Admin. Go to:

Settings --> Members --> E-mail Newsletter

It should look something like this:

2. Obtain SMTP credentials: Once you made sure that your domain is verified, go to the Mailgun dashboard, click on your domain, and note down the following information:

• SMTP Hostname (e.g., smtp.eu.mailgun.org) (1)
• Default SMTP Login (e.g., postmaster@yourdomain.com) (2)
• Default Password (press the Reset password button to show) (3)

4. Access your Ghost CMS configuration file: SSH into your Digital Ocean droplet (or other server) using a terminal or an SSH client like PuTTY. The command should look like this:

ssh root@your_droplet_ip

5. Locate the Ghost CMS configuration file: The configuration file is usually named config.production.json and is located in the Ghost installation directory. By default, it should be in /var/www/ghost. Change to that directory using the following command:

cd /var/www/ghost

6. Edit the configuration file: Open the config.production.json file using a text editor like nano:

nano config.production.json

Locate the mail section in the JSON file. It should look like this:

"mail": {
  "transport": "Direct"
},

7. Update the mail configuration: Replace the existing mail section with the following, making sure to replace the placeholders with your actual Mailgun SMTP credentials:

"mail": {
  "transport": "SMTP",
  "options": {
    "service": "Mailgun",
    "host": "your_smtp_hostname",
    "port": 587,
    "secureConnection": false,
    "auth": {
      "user": "your_smtp_login",
      "pass": "your_smtp_password"
    }
  }
},

Save and exit the editor: To do so, press CTRL + X, then Y, and finally Enter to save the changes and exit nano.

8. Restart Ghost CMS: To apply the changes, restart Ghost using the following command:

ghost restart

10. Test email sending: To test if emails are sent correctly, sign up as a new user with your second E-Mail address.

You don't have to pay $35 a month for Mailgun

Read my blog post on how to downgrade to Mailgun's (very well) hidden pay-as-you-go plan:

How to Downgrade to the Flex Plan in Mailgun in 2023

Don’t want to pay $35 for sending out a few dozen emails a month? Me neither! Follow this step by step guide to downgrade to Mailgun’s (very well) hidden Pay-As-You-Go plan.

Nick's Data JourneyNick Schnee

Like what you see?

In this tutorial, I will guide you through the process of installing Selenium on a Mac and using it in Python to search for smartwatches on Amazon.

Install Chrome & Chromedriver

To get started with Web Scraping on Mac OS, we need to install Google Chrome and Chromedriver. You can do this by running the following Bash-Script in your terminal.

1) Copy Bash Script

First, copy the following code and create a new file called: mac_update_chromedriver_and_chrome.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Check if Homebrew is installed, install if not
if ! command -v brew &> /dev/null; then
    echo "Homebrew not found. Installing Homebrew..."
    /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
fi

# Update Homebrew
brew update

# Install Google Chrome
if ! command -v google-chrome &> /dev/null; then
    echo "Google Chrome not found. Installing Google Chrome..."
    brew install --cask google-chrome
else
    echo "Google Chrome already installed. Skipping..."
fi

# Install Chromedriver
if ! command -v chromedriver &> /dev/null; then
    echo "Chromedriver not found. Installing Chromedriver..."
    brew install chromedriver
else
    echo "Chromedriver already installed. Skipping..."
fi

echo "Installation complete!"

2) Run Bash Script

Now run your Bash-Script it from your Terminal app on Mac OS.

1. Open the Terminal App and navigate to the directory where the script is located using the "cd" command

cd /Users/nick/Desktop

2. Make the script executable by running the command:

chmod +x update_chromedriver_and_chrome.sh

3. Run the script by typing the command:

./update_chromedriver_and_chrome.sh

When running the script for the first time, you may encounter the following error message:

If you encounter this error, navigate to:

"System Preferences" --> "Security & Privacy"

and click "Allow Anyway"

Now run your bash script again using the command:

./update_chromedriver_and_chrome.sh

3) Check if Installation was Successful

Run the following code in your terminal to check if the installation of Chrome & Chromedriver was successful:

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --version && chromedriver --version 

4) Install Selenium in Python Environment

First, activate your Python-Environment. Replace 'nicks-env' with your own python environment you'd like to use:

source venv/nicks-env/bin/activate

And install selenium using

pip install selenium

5) Run a little test script

This script opens Chrome, goes to amazon.com and searches for 'smartwatch'.

Note that the script uses the 'time' library, so you might to 'pip install time' first.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
import time

print("start")
driver = webdriver.Chrome()

url = 'https://www.amazon.com'

driver.get(url)

time.sleep(1)

driver.find_element(by=By.XPATH, value='//*[@id="twotabsearchtextbox"]').send_keys('smartwatch')

time.sleep(1)

driver.find_element(by=By.XPATH, value='//*[@id="nav-search-submit-button"]').click()

time.sleep(5)

driver.close()

print("end")

If you see 'start' and 'end' printed in the console, everything worked as expected.

• For Mac: File Update Chromedriver and Chrome
• For Linux: File Update Chromedriver and Chrome