Side project
Tell us what hashtagsearches.com does.
For businesses with a website or mobile
application that are using Instagram as a marketing
platform, it is important to be able to share content
between these mediums. I have written an API that
allows developers to query Instagram’s Graph API for
media with specific hashtags. To give developers a
more visual environment for testing interactions with
this custom API, hashtagsearches.com was created.Why did you create it?
One of my clients, a florist, asked if it was possible to
power image galleries with specific media from
Instagram. Looking at the documentation for
Instagram’s Graph API, they have given the ability –
via the Hashtag Search API. However, this throttles
users to 30 unique hashtags in seven-day period.
I decided to write a custom API layer that queried
media associated with the Instagram business
account and then filtered this media by hashtag. The
API allows media to be processed first.What were you hoping to achieve?
Initially, I set out to achieve the end goal for the
client. However, during the process I began to realise
that this API and hashtagsearches.com could be used
to help other developers. This project has really
opened my eyes to the open-source community. It hasmade me appreciate the efforts that other developers
go through to produce the libraries, frameworks and
other tools we take for granted.What technologies were used in building it?
Being a C# developer, I wanted to use Microsoft’s .NET
Core 2.1 to create the API layer. Not only did it allow
me to use familiar technologies, it also allowed me to
easily deploy the API to an Azure environment. The
reason I wanted to use Azure’s cloud hosting was for
scalability; if this API starts to receive a lot of traffic, I
want to scale up the hardware to meet the demand.
The testing facility, hashtagsearches.com, was
written as a plain HTML5 application. I use SCSS for
preprocessing the CSS and ES6 with Babel 7 for
JavaScript compilation. Both the API and the test
facility run through Cloudflare for DDoS protection
and caching. I also use Cloudflare to manage DNS for
all of my domains.How has it been received?
So far, the API and hashtagsearches.com have had
really positive feedback. Other developers have asked
for access to the API after using hashtagsearches.com
to play around with their Instagram applications.What do you think you’ll do next with it?
My plan with the API is to build in an authentication
layer to provide a way for other developers to use the
API as well as giving me better visibility. I definitely
feel that as the API progresses, hashtagsearches.com
will naturally progress with it. Being a test facility, if
the API is updated, the test environment also needs to
change to cater for the API updates.HASHTAGSEARCHES.COM
Christian Coan on his Instagram hashtag API
SIDE PROJECT OF THE MONTHCHRISTIAN
COAN
job: Coan is a full-stack
developer at Crafted,
a digital marketing
agency in Ipswich. He’s
also a hobbyist Adobe
XD designer, creating
awesome UX through
prototypes.
w: https://
hashtagsearches.com
t: @chrisjcoanINFO