I thought I'd shift gears a bit and start working on some tooling for Buttondown, which delivers this newsletter. While I've been happy with the service, there are a few gaps in features that I'd like to have. Fortunately, they offer a free API for customers and I've been using it to build tooling to fill in those gaps. I thought you might like to see how I'm doing it and get a peek into my thought process. This won't be code that you can follow along on your own, but you should be able to apply the same principles to your projects. ## Archive Searching I love that all of my previous newsletters are available in an online [archive](https://buttondown.email/behind-the-powershell-pipeline/archive/). However, the site doesn't have a direct search feature. If you wanted to find what I have written about eventing, you can't easily do that from the web site. Fortunately, the content is crawled by search engines, so you could use Google. In the Google search box, you can type `site:buttondown.email/behind-the-powershell-pipeline eventing` and you'll get a list of results from my newsletter. If you are a premium subscriber, you can read the full archived article. What I don't know is if Google is searching the limited preview that is available to non-premium subscribers or the full article. Regardless, I'd like to build something that I can publish or post somewhere that you can use to search the archive. To be honest, I have no idea what I want to build yet. I have some ideas on what I want to do, but nothing definitive on a deliverable. ## Exploring the Buttondown API In any event, the first step is to use the Buttondown API to get the data I need. I'm going to use PowerShell to do this, of course, using the `Invoke-RestMethod` cmdlet. Buttondown publishers, like me, can get an API key to access newsletter-related data. The API is documented, although, like much API documentation, it is aimed at developers and not scripters like myself.