WEEDPORN DEVELOPER BLOG
What’s up party people, I just wanted to start a new series where I keep you updated on what’s going on in the backend of WeedPornDaily. Here you’ll find out what we’ve been up to, programming developments, and how we run our canna-business.
7/11/2017 – What’s happening party people? I hope everyone had a dank and dab-filled 7/10! We’ve been keeping busy this weekend while everyone was passing out from heat stroke at Chalice. Today I want to talk about our open source cannabis API, how we made it, and how it’s the future of cannabis tech.
I’ve mentioned in a previous blog that we started a website called Kushy a while ago. Kushy is a place to connect people with cannabis, whether you’re looking for a dispensary or headshop, or you want a specific product or strain – you can find everything you need on Kushy (well, soon). We’re also looking to build a patient verification system for dispensaries, so you can upload your I.D. and MMJ rec and pre-order pot from a dispensary. Lots of cool stuff you can do with cannabis data.
But enough about what Kushy does, let’s talk about the data behind Kushy. We had to gather a lot of data to fill up a website like Kushy. From storefronts, to strains, to products, to brands - we had to research the cannabis industry top to bottom to accrue the data necessary to fill a directory of this magnitude. We spent weeks scouring Google for headshops across the U.S., and we’ve gone to countless local events to discover new brands and products. In total, we have over 800 unique cannabis strains, over 2800 storefronts, and over 4200 brands that we’ve been able to document in the cannabis industry. And from our calculations (getting really high and hypothesizing with homies), we presume that we’ve only captured ¼, if not less of the ever-growing world of ganja.
So that’s where you come in. We’re tired of companies hoarding cannabis data to make a profit from it. We’re releasing all this information, for free, to the public, available in multiple formats. Now you’re probably thinking, where do I come in? Soon, we need stoners like you to help us fill in this database, and use this technology in your projects.
We’re still setting stuff up, so we don’t have a direct and accessible way to help yet – but we’re getting there fast. We’re building an API, which is essentially a website that talks to other apps and gives them data - in this case, the dankest of data. You can see an example here: http://api.kushy.net/api/1.1/tables/strains/rows/1. Still don’t know what I’m talking about? People use APIs everyday to connect social media networks, when you see someone’s tweets or Instagram pics on website that isn’t Twitter/Instagram - they used an API to get the tweets/photos.
So you can use this data however you want. Want to build a price comparison app for dispensaries? Do it. Making a strain diary and want to calculate how much THC someone’s consumed based off real strains? We got your back.
Now lets get a little technical. We originally built the API using Wordpress, and that was too slow. So we custom built a NodeJS/Express backend to have the most efficient and fastest server routing, but that didn’t work out with our current server configuration and cost limitations. Instead, we went with an open source PHP-based API I’ve experimented with in the past called Directus. Directus allowed us to quickly scaffold a API structure without worrying about nuances like building out OAuth and admin interfaces.
We’ve started to fill up the API with our data. It’s gonna take a little time, as I’m going through and optimizing each of the data tables and converting data in some cases. So far I’ve added all 800+ strains we’ve collected, you can use the API to query those.
All of this stuff will be going up on our Github once it’s a little more developed and ready for you all to run off and tinker with it. In the mean time, keep your eyes peeled on our dev blogs and Twitter where we’ve been posting updates.
Let’s create the future of cannabis together!
Stay regular super stoners~
Oscar
