Extended the Python API

I extended the API to add some things that will be regularly used by Sharon and I.  I pulled some code out of the scripts and put them into a module that can be used to continue to extend the API.  I added support for GitHub API authentication since without authentication you can only make 60 requests per hour which prevents running the scripts very often, or at all as OSB expands.  I changed some variable names and added line breaks for PEP8 compliance (I hope this isn't too annoying).