Ok, I suppose this means I was bored this morning. I was looking around for some web API's that might be worthwhile doing a "Smalltalk Daily" on, and I ran across "Capitol Words" - and it's a fascinating look at word frequency (out of the Congressional Record, I presume). You can search by date, by Congressman - it's a nifty site.

So of course, I figured some Smalltalk code might be in order. Here's a simple example:

url := 'http://capitolwords.org/api/word/bank/2008/5/23/feed.json'.
contents := (HttpClient new get: url) contents.
data := JsonReader readFrom: contents readStream.
^data

That will give you back a dictionary, assuming you loaded JsonReader from the public store - like this:

You can also do a query for the entire year, using a different url:

url := 'http://capitolwords.org/api/word/bank/2008/feed.json'.

I sorted those results by date, and got this:

It would be straightforward to pop a little GUI on that - I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader :)

Now Listening to: How Can I Refuse by Heart from: Rock The House Live