I am in the process of redesigning my blog. The default Wordpress theme is nice and all but Charlie and Catherine have shamed me into doing something less mundane.
One of the things that had bothered me was my blog roll. It was out-of-date because Wordpress’s default way of handling links make it pretty painful to import a list of links. Actually the first time is easy and great but every time after that you just want to shoot yourself. The other problem was that the list was long and it messed up the way the page looked.
So I decided to trim the list in the side bar to just people that I know. But declarative living requires that I keep my blogroll public. So I decided to create a blogroll page (you can find the results here).
Being lazy like I am, I refuse to create this page by hand. I noticed
that FeedLounge can export my subscriptions
as OPML.
Sadly, FeedLounge completely ignores web
architecture. For example, the URI
used to export a OPML is http://my.feedlounge.com/export/opml which
does not point at my subscriptions but rather to some bit of code
that can generate a OPML file. This bit of code figures out who’s
subscriptions to export based on, I suppose, a cookie, or something.
The details do not matter because it is not something that I can
reasonably duplicate in my schedulable ruby script. So instead I have
to manually download the OPML file, then transform it and then push it
to the server. That process does not take very long but is really
annoying that I have to do it. One demerit for FeedLounge
for forcing me into a manual process that could have been easily
avoided.
So why use REST? Because I want to use your application in ways you have not anticipated or haven’t had the time to implement yet.
Comments 5
Stay tuned for some real APIs coming soon that should give you exactly what you’re looking for. The problem with what you are currently trying to do is that your GET request doesn’t have a n authenticated session associated with it (if it did, it would work), not that we don’t support REST (FeedLounge is ~99% REST).
Posted 07 Apr 2006 at 10:05 am ¶Well, if it were really RESTful my subscription list would be a
resource with a real name, say something like
http://feedlounge.com/pezra/subscriptions/opml. If I attempted toGET that resource outside of an authenticated session it support HTTP
based authentication (401 responses, etc). Perhaps the most important
part of REST is the uniform interface it provides. A proprietary
application specific authentication scheme is not RESTful.
That being said I understand that providing machine readable data to
Posted 07 Apr 2006 at 8:21 pm ¶the outside world is not one of FeedLounge’s
priorities. It is a user facing aggregator all, and the user
experience is nice.
I don’t know if FeedLounge is in fact ~99% REST or not. To be perfectly honest I have not really looked at the information architecture of FeedLounge beyond this the the URLs that show up in the address line (but since FeedLounge is deeply AJAX the URIs in the address line do not tell the whole story). So it is possible that this area is an anomily in the RESTfulness of FeedLounge.
Posted 07 Apr 2006 at 8:31 pm ¶That is exactly what the API will be providing, among other things. The URL has already been determined and will be:
http://api.feedlounge.com/username/feeds/opml
Look for this to be available in the next week or two.
So many features to build, so little time.
Posted 08 Apr 2006 at 1:55 am ¶Feedback welcome. :)
http://feedlounge.com/blog/2006/04/20/matt-walters-release/
Posted 20 Apr 2006 at 10:42 pm ¶Post a Comment