The Wambooli Stock Index will be one year old tomorrow. How’s it doin’?<\/p>\n
Well. It’s dead.
\n
\nEarly 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
To make the number manageable, I added dangerous math to make the index equal to 100. That day was May 24, 2013.<\/p>\n
And here it is, one year later. (Well, one year minus a day.) And the index is dead.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Now I could have fetched the data from another source. And I tried for a while, but then I got busy with other things.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After an entire year, the Wambooli Stock Index marches on. Not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5229"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6133,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5229\/revisions\/6133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}