The Wambooli Stock Index will be one year old tomorrow. How’s it doin’?

Well. It’s dead.

Early last year, I got a bug in me to start posting high tech stock prices here on Wambooli. At first I just wanted to put a few key stocks — Microsoft, Apple, Google — out on the front page. Before I could do that, I had to figure out how such a thing could work.

I know that it’s possible to pull in stock quotes for display on a web site. Desktop widgets and gadgets do it, so I just had to figure out where to find the data and how to read it. To do that, I dived into the study of something called XML feeds, where XML is merely raw data formatted by using the eXtensive Markup Language.

XML is similar to HTML, but it’s not used for text output. It’s just data! So a website or a program can read XML, decipher that data, and then do something with it. That’s how I created the Wambooli Tech Stock index: I stole data from Google Finance and then created the list of stocks.

Rather than a few stocks, I chose about 30. Then I thought, why not track their performance over time? So I coded the WSI database, which recorded the daily closing price of all the stocks.

To make the number manageable, I added dangerous math to make the index equal to 100. That day was May 24, 2013.

And here it is, one year later. (Well, one year minus a day.) And the index is dead.

It’s dead not because my code failed; it worked just fine — for several months. Then Google stopped making its XML feed available. In fact, pretty much all its XML feeds were killed. I don’t know why, but they’re gone.

Now I could have fetched the data from another source. And I tried for a while, but then I got busy with other things.

So the Wambooli Stock Index is dead. I can, however, report that it did go up over time: During the several weeks that the index was alive, it peaked at a value of 118, which meant the index rose approximately 18 percent. That’s a good return, but alas, not something that lasted as long as I would have liked.