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Using Airtable through its API programmatically, as (almost) remote database

I recently talked a lot about the importance of collaborative and smarter documentation that will improve your personal and professional workflow. Certainly, it will be different than other competitors in an interesting use case I found myself in one of the hobby projects that I used Airtable as a remote database tool all of the sudden.

Airtable is a very nice mobile-friendly document management in a “spreadsheet” style base. You can create your data structure in any data table model. You can create different views for your data (in calendar view, or filtered table view, or kanban view…).

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What makes Airtable special for me is its API. Their API is so easy to get started and access, because you get your data-specific API documentation after you login. It shows your data in API example right and there in the dynamic documentation.

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Airtable API essentially makes Airtable that can be used as a remote database for small or personal projects. Managing your data belongs to Airtable’s clean and nice web or mobile interface, and you implement your data in any format you like on any platform.

If you are needing read-only access, implementing Airtable API can be a matter of minutes since the documentation gives access to your data very quickly. You only need to convert the curl request to your favorite platform’s HTTP request. If you are needing a javascript version, it also produces NodeJS example code that you can drop in and start using your data.

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Write access is also not very different than read-only. Your data model will be well be documented in the dynamic API documentation for your table. You only need to start constructing your API requests and make the call…

If you haven’t created an Airtable account and played with it, definitely do so: https://airtable.com/ and check out their auto-generated documentation here: https://airtable.com/api (after you login to your account).

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mfyz.com is responsive!

I’ve put my efforts on making mfyz.com responsive and mobile compatible last week. After 4 days work, now you are able to access mfyz.com from your tablets and phones (small screen devices).

I’ll write about coding responsive layouts following weeks. There are lots of CSS frameworks that allows you to build responsive layouts but I didn’t use any CSS frameworks when I coded current interface. I could transition to twitter bootstrap but I didn’t see any need to do so. Also the current layout is simple enough to not require any complex structure. Anyway, let’s get back to the subject.

Desktop version (as you can see above) is displayed for 800px and wider screen resolutions. For smaller screens than 800px, interface turns to mobile compatible fluid layout. As you know, fluid layouts are resolution independent because they are fitting the screen they’re in. That’s the reason most of the mobile compatible pages built in fluid layouts.

Tablet devices are usually 800px and wider when they are held landscape, so you will see mfyz.com’s desktop version for landscape orientation on most of the tablets.

Also, most of the tablets have below 800px wide screen resolution for portrait orientation, so the site becomes fluid and mobile compatible version. The mobile compatible version is optimized for better readability and optimized navigation.