This is a bit different from my usual WordPress/PHP posts, but I still wanted to share as a general development exercise and also to hopefully let other people know what I discovered about working with Child’s Play.
I am friends with the couple who runs the Game On Marathon, a 100-hour video gaming marathon which raises money every year for the Child’s Play charity. As part of the festivities when the event is happening, they needed the ability to trigger different giveaways based on when we hit certain milestones in the fundraising effort. There is a C++ script which handles these giveaways, but it needs to be told what dollar amount the event is at and that was 
currently being done by hand. Child’s Play has a website widget which displays the info, but there didn’t seem to be a way of easily getting their hands on the donation total at different points in time for the program so they asked if I may be able to help.
At first I tried to scrape the website via remote POST, but that was a bust. Since the Child’s Play widget is driven by a `.js` script include, none of the generated markup was available in the DOM when you hit the page from a remote script. While looking through the js source, however, I found reference to a JSON API endpoint which looked promising. I had initially tried googling for such a thing, but came up empty, so my guess is that this is an API they possibly only mean to use internally / by their own tools.
