MetAPI

Screenshots

Contents

• Screenshots
• Installation
  • Required Packages
• Overview
  • Motivation
  • Decisions
• Usage
  • Customization
• Disclaimers/Warning
• Road Map
  • Pretty Format Groups of Fields
  • Clean up Functions to be Consistent with dash.el
• Known Issues
• Change Log
  • 0.1

Installation

Not hosted on any ELPA or MELPA, and not planning to due to low code quality

Required Packages

url, modus-themes, cl, dash.

modus-themes is built-in in emacs 28.

Overview

Motivation

A small package to fetch and display random art pieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection API.

A personal project to work with a REST API and emacs lisp.

Decisions

Only deals with Objects and Object Endpoints. I did not consider Departments and Search integral to casually viewing art pieces.

Usage

Run with met-run. Opens another window in Org mode with a random art object’s information. Being Org mode, links should be navigable and images, if present, should be shown.

Customization

Display which field you want to be displayed by (setq met-FIELD t), and vice versa.

Objects frequently do not have certain fields, so those cannot be shown.

Disclaimers/Warning

From official Met API website (as of July 19, 2021):

At this time, we do not require API users to register or obtain an API key to use the service. Please limit request rate to 80 requests per second.”

Road Map

Pretty Format Groups of Fields

• Can do retroactively by regex-ing for ^artist, etc.

Define Faces for Title and Groups

Clean up Functions to be Consistent with dash.el

• Currently using a mix of cl and native elisp

Known Issues

• Evaluation of whole file takes a bit due to defining met-ALL-OBJECTS, the IDs of all 450000+ objects.
• met-random-object-id sometimes fails to get a valid ID, due to some being omitted in repository.
  • this is “solved” met-run by querying until a valid ID is produced, but is costly in terms of rate limits.
• met-generate function is extremely messy
• Non Ascii (?) characters are not printed correctly
  • May frequently see \200\200\223 etc.
  • I believe this may be due to url or how json-read-object processes this text.
  • This issue is not seen using CLI curl
• met-objectID must be set to t for everything else to display properly
  • May be due being first in list, or some other obscure reason

Change Log

0.1

Initial package, alpha version

Only exposed function is met-run.