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alt227

I fully agree.

Two of my favourites:

Holiday API I plug into every ecommerce site I work on:

https://www.api.gov.uk/gds/bank-holidays/#bank-holidays

Domain Email Security checker:

https://emailsecuritycheck.service.ncsc.gov.uk/check

Please share any other favourites!

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The fact that the UK government's bank holiday API has bunting advice just makes my day.

Where did you find this? Is it part of the API response?

Would be fun to use this for some digital decor at home.

Next bank holiday is Christmas so I've got some time to build something!

EDIT: Just found it in the JSON; shame, was hoping it would contain bunting patterns/colours.

https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays.json

It looks like that's only false for Good Friday, which I suppose makes sense that as a Christian you don't "celebrate" the execution of Jesus.

Indeed, there are others such as the queen's funeral. Bunting is reserved for celebrations.

If you go off this issue it looks like they use tinsel at Christmas, although I'm not sure where that logic is.

https://github.com/alphagov/calendars/issues/678

I'd be interested in taking a look to see if they use different bunting styles for different occasions, my thought process was that I could create some form of digital-bunting in my home to indicate various occasions.

As a(n) (English) Brit, I believe this could be quite an excellent indicator of whether I should be drinking Guiness, Tea, Whisky, Pimms, Champagne or Mulled Wine at any given time of the year. I suppose it should live in the Kitchen, near the kettle, or the wine cooler.

I love that the bank holiday one tells you whether or not bunting is appropriate on that day. It looks like the ones for which it isn't are ones commemorating death, like the state funeral of Elizabeth II and Good Friday (Crucifixion of Jesus).

Yes: a plain JSON endpoint with no authentication! It's the perfect way of exposing this kind of data.

I wonder how the backend works... Is it a microservice which queries over a globally distributed 'bank holidays' database, which has a frontend for some admin to add/remove bank holidays, and perhaps a custom approval workflow to approve/deny bank holidays, and maybe a system to make new bank holidays 'go live' on a certain date/time?

Or is it just a static file someone wrote in vim and checked into git which got hosted as a static asset?

https://github.com/alphagov/calendars/blob/master/README.md

It's a static file manually written (and slightly post processed).

DVLA VES. Never miss a car tax payment or MOT again.

https://developer-portal.driver-vehicle-licensing.api.gov.uk...

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