Putting a website together using external data - how would I do this?

parc

Hi there
I want to create an informational website that uses publicly available data. 
For example; 

• Statistics on average income in different countries
• Currencies used
• Population 

etc. 

I'm just trying to figure out what I need to learn to do this. Do I need an API from a website that provides the data (eg Word Bank). 

Do I link the API to a HTML file (ie website). 

Would also like to make interactive maps to be built into the website. Know of any software that allows you to do this?

Thanks

Graham

parc wrote: »

Do I link the API to a HTML file (ie website). 

You need something in between the data and the html.

The 'something' would grab the data from the API and output the html.

You'd probably want 'something else' to store the data you've grabbed from the API to cache on your web server otherwise the API provider could get fairly miffed if every page load on your website required a call to their API.

'Something' could be PHP
'Something' else could be a MySQL database

Given the nature of your questions, prepare yourself for lots of homework.

parc

Nice one. 
I was actually going to ask where SQL, JSON etc. fits in.

So you have a website  built from HTML/CSS, and you would use MySQL to connect to an SQL database to fetch the data? You could also do the same for a database in JSON?

Learning a bit of HTML/CSS and SQL querying and was just wondering how they all tie together.

daymobrew

parc wrote: »

I was actually going to ask where SQL, JSON etc. fits in.

So you have a website  built from HTML/CSS, and you would use MySQL to connect to an SQL database to fetch the data? You could also do the same for a database in JSON?

JSON is not a database, it is a structured way of sending information back and forth.

You will likely query the Word Bank website, either downloading web pages and scraping the data from them or, preferably, getting the raw data through an API that they provide. In the latter case the data might be returned in a JSON format. This could be PHP for either scenario.

You would then store the parsed data in your database (probably a MySQL database). This could again be PHP.
Then you would later query your database to present the data to the visitors of your website (this could be PHP to query database and create the HTML and CSS to style it).

igCorcaigh

If you intend to use a server as the middle man, then you will be paying hosting fees for that server. You could rent a cloud server for this purpose, eg amazon or azure. What server side language will you code in?

Alternatively, you could build your model and views on the client. Look at javascript frameworks like knockout.js or AngularJS.

Also, look into the mvc pattern. This can be implemented server side or client side.

parc

Thanks both; they probably sound like simple questions but a lot of online tutorials don't really lay down how all these things can be combined. 

In terms of server side programming language I'm looking to do it in Python  (using Django). This is because I'm also hoping to learn Python for some data analysis / visualisation. 

I've also dabbled in server side Swift and Vapour, but that's more a a side-side project, as I'm interested in learning Swift. 

I would also like to learn D3 for visuals too.

andywozhere

If you are building a website with Wordpress you could use a tool like wpallimport.com to import data (XML, CSV) and then present it whatever way you like.

parc

andywozhere wrote: »

If you are building a website with Wordpress you could use a tool like wpallimport.com to import data (XML, CSV) and then present it whatever way you like.

Nice one. I guess this would be the quickest way to get this project off the ground?