Thursday, February 20, 2014

Added JSONP Support for Client Side Calls

Initially, this service was made for server side usage. I received an email request to support client side API calls. The problem is by default browsers do not allow ajax calls from a different domain. They call it the "Same Origin Policy" or SOP. This is a security feature which blocks script calls from different domains because it's potentially unsafe.

I learned that there is a workaround to this issue. You can actually support client side API calls through the use of JSONP or "JSON with padding". This allows client side javascript programs to get data from server with a different domain.

In this service, specifying a "callback" parameter automatically transforms the result to jsonp.

Example:
http://www.freecurrencyconverterapi.com/api/v2/convert?q=USD_PHP&compact=y&callback=sampleCallback

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Ko-Fi.com is down, made custom donation coffee cups instead

Previously, I used ko-fi.com service to create a "buy me coffee" donation option for visitors. Recently, Ko-Fi website suddenly went down for reasons unknown so I was forced to use Paypal's official way of creating donation buttons. I decided to get a bit creative..

I downloaded a stock photo of a coffee papercup


Edited it a little


It did undergo several versions, until voila!













I had fund customizing that I decided to offer different sizes. So there it is, my custom "buy me coffee" donation style. You are free to use the style above.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Decided to remove ads from this website

This site was created to provide free, high performance and intuitive currency conversion services to software developers and website administrations. It also provides quick converter calculators to end users to calculate one currency to another.

Even though this service is free, it still costs me to provide this service. Previously, I placed an ad on this website with the idea that this can be a self-sustaining site because there are costs in running a website like this. Costs include the domain, hosting fees and the coffee I need to maintain this site.

Now, I decided to remove the ad and turn to donation based funding because sites like this really don't benefit much from 3rd party advertisements, at least not yet.

The ads have been removed. Visitors who appreciate the free service and would like to help maintain the website and buy me a coffee instead.

Free currency conversion tool

http://www.freecurrencyconverterapi.com has just been launched. It offers free web services to developers and web admins to convert one currency to another. You are free to use this for personal or commercial application however it offers no warranty.

Currency values are updated every 30 minutes. If you need a realtime web service or a service that updates more frequent, you may contact me for more information.

Convert queries accepts a maximum of 10 conversion parameters to avoid abuse of the service and to help maintain the health of the web services. If you need more than the limit, you may contact me for more information.