Using Pocket Developer API

1 liner

To get my reading history from Pocket, I'm going to use pocketr kindly shared by Filip Stachura 🙂

• (not on CRAN, doesn't seem to be the full workflow necessary, presumably omitted from the git repo for privacy reasons)
  • also note this code, a Shiny dashboard which appears to build on this to view time-based stats with plotly

Why?

After I get this, I'm going to analyse what I've read to hunt down something I remember reading [vaguely] about Stephen Hawking (see tweet, 26th July 2017 🚀🚀🚀)

Documenting the Pocket developer API:

• Make a new app here

  • Give it a name (mine is qupo for "queck-pock" 🦆),
    • to [eventually] correspond to the repo at queck/pock
  • Give it a description (mine is Pick a peck of Pocket 🌶️)
  • Give it permissions (mine is just having Retrieve - I don't want to accidentally lose my Pocket info!)
  • Pick its platform/s (mine is just using Desktop (other) - I'll use R from RStudio)
  • Thoughtlessly After much deliberation, accept the ToS
    • they say don't modify, translate, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or create any derivative works based on the Pocket API or the Pocket API Specifications, be nice and legal and don't spy on anyone etc.
    • also you can't use the names "Pocket" or "Read It Later"(!)
    • I'm just going to use it to get at my own data, but you do you

• To handle 'secrets' (confidential credentials for the API authorisation process) I willyou may want to follow the guidance of Jenny Bryan here which is [in brief] to use .Renviron, loading credentials from outside your code repo, for maximum reassurance of not accidentally committing code to the cloud or GitHub etc., as was the consensus [ish] in the replies to her thread here (2015, and apparently still in 2017)

  • Jenny's piece was recommended in this tutorial, "Handling OAuth secrets securely with RStudio on your Mac", however I don't want to follow the guidance there either (using 1Password)
  • Jenny's advice will apply across all R sessions, and I don't need that.
  • instead I will store it in the code repo, but ensuring it is specified as private in the .gitignore