Charl Botha has a really interesting post on importing data from a RESTful Webservice into an Org table. He gives the example of downloading cryptocurrency trading values and updating a table showing the total value of a user’s holdings but it’s easy to imagine all sorts of useful applications for the strategy.
Besides the idea of using the request package to retrieve data from a Website, Botha also demonstrates a couple of useful techniques that I didn’t know about. The first is the cl-function macro that allows you to use the full set of Common Lisp function argument forms. You probably won’t use that very often but it’s just what’s needed for Botha’s application.
The second technique is the use of the let-alist form. That’s a new macro from Artur Malabarba in Emacs 25 that makes it easy to access data in alists in a concise and natural way. Take a look at Botha’s post for a nice example of its use.
So even if you don’t have a need to import Web data into an Org table, it’s still worthwhile studying Botha’s post for the useful techniques.