Announce: Net::HTTP::Factual

Factual hosts community editable data on a variety of topics, and hopes to be your one-stop-shop for wiki-data. They provide an element of "truthiness" for rows to show if the data is verified and some other interesting ideas.

They hosted a contest at Startup weekend LA last week, with the top team winning kindles for each member. I didn't win the contest[*], since I got pulled onto a different team and didn't finish my factual thingy (clearly I didn't define my factual thingie either). I did create a quick cpan module to wrap the factual ReST interface, Net::HTTP::Factual. I built it using Spore.

All I needed to do was translate the API documentation into json for spore to load. I also needed to work out the differences between Spore v0.2 spec format the v0.1 documentation. The demonstration spec files in the spore github are in the v0.1 format. These are the problems of using bleeding edge alphaware -- Spore v.01 came out Oct 12, v0.2 on Oct 14 and I was using them Oct 16.

* : I didn't win the contest, but it did remind that I wanted a kindle. So I went home and ordered one. It arrived two days ago, and I'm 80 pages into my first book. The screen is gorgeous. I'm reading a PDF of the Mythical Man-Month, and while the pdf handling isn't perfect it works well -- flows quite nicely reading from a rotated screen. Props!