About a year ago, I was excited to discover ColourLovers had an API. There is some great data about colours and palettes on that site, and some great possibilities for mashups - some as general-purpose art projects, and some as tools for designers.

However, I noticed there was no JSON-P interface, so there was no way to write a pure browser-based mashup. I got in touch with them, and heard back from Chris Williams, who to my pleasant surprise was willing to introduce JSON-P. And so we had some email discussion about the various options for the API interface (e.g. do you call it “jsonp” versus “callback”; do you use “real JSONP” versus just a callback function; do you hardcode the name of the callback function versus let the caller specify it as a parameter), and ultimately Chris went ahead and implemented it a short time later and published the API on January 26, 2009. Fantastic!

I offered to make some demos illustrating code usage, and did around that time, but never got around to publishing them until now. I’ve released the demos here. There’s a couple of JQuery demos, and one raw Javascript demo. I had fun making them and have plans to do a lot more with this API.