Posts tagged API
Selected (belated, extended) Saturday Links
Mar 28th
The past two weeks haven’t really left time to compile my selected links, though there have been many. A few days at SxSWi (on which more, later) followed by travelling with the family and the inevitable work backlog moved blogging way down the priority list. So here’s a mammoth selection to get me caught up. Particularly interesting has been the discussion around the future of newspapers (represented here by Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson and Russell Davies), which seem to have finally pushed beyond “how t ind a good business model for papers” to looking at where the real value for society lies and how we can preserve and extend that in a changing landscape.
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Making a jQuery Plugin Truly Customizable » Learning jQuery – Tips, Techniques, Tutorials
Some nice tips for managing options, and a reminder to find _useful_ customisations not just load with customisation options without much thought about/consultation with other potential users
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iPhone Coding For Web Developers
Presentation slides from the internet's Matt Biddulph
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Rack::Test released: Simply test any Rack-compatible app — Bryan Helmkamp
There's a _lot_ to like about increased adoption of rack. "With Rack::Test, we hope to make it easy for frameworks to encourage their users to write tests by making it trivial to provide a testing environment. We’d like to foster compatibility between Ruby web app testing environments (especially important as ideas like multi-framework apps become more prominent). The philosophy is the library should stay small and extendable so frameworks can layer on additional functionality they want to offer without modifying Rack::Test’s core behavior or resorting to monkeypatching."
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Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky
"That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen …. Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify." … and a a lot more
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russell davies: newspapers and all that
"If we are going to create a new news ecosystem involving advertisers (and a lot of people would be grateful for that money) then we're going to have to do something about that institutional bifurcation between content and commerce. We're going to have to design the relationship between the two with the care of a good experience designer." – a response to Ben Hammersley asking if anyone talking about the future of newspapers had talked to anyone in advertising
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Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors – Laughing Meme
"Simon Willison asked this week about best practice for architecting activity streams. And the answer is, “It depends.” Depends on the scope, scale, access patterns, and affordances you’re building — your contract with your users.
Which is a long way of saying think hard about the promises you make to your users, implicitly or explicitly.
And, Facebook, my friend, what the HELL are you thinking? You managed to negotiate the best deal in the business, talk about a racket, and you threw it away for a piece of Twitter’s pain? Are you stupid? Well, best of luck with that."
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SXSW Interactive Videos and Podcasts | SXSW.com
Most of the sessions were recorded and this is the place to get hold of them.
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SXSWi: Location-based service is the trend at Austin, Texas |
"Predictably, location-based services were a major feature this year, with launches that included Foursquare, a social, location-based game by the Dodgeball creator, Dennis Crowley, and a new Facebook application for the location management tool Fire Eagle. While early adopters such as the SXSWers have been exploring location-based services for some time, it is inevitable that more consumer and privacy-friendly versions will start to creep into the mainstream."
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stevenberlinjohnson.com: Old Growth Media And The Future Of News
"I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago." … and …" Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link."
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On running a panel
A mixup over bus times meant I didn't make it to Andrew's panel at SxSW, but I heard many good things. It's really great to see this kind of debriefing-in-public going on. Hopefully it'll make for a stronger set of talks and panels next year.
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Guardian API Maps – Home
"This is a site that lets you search the Guardian's new API and add location information to articles. All the place data we collect is being made available to anyone who wants it."
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Foursquare, Hot New Phone App, Is Dodgeball on Steroids | The New York Observer
Quite a few people seemed to be playing with Foursquare at SxSW but most of the Brits were excluded as we didn't want to use that much data and it wasn't available in the UK iTunes store. One to watch, though.
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A few notes on the Guardian Open Platform
I saw Simon present the Guardian Platform at SxSW and it looks like a great achievement. Waiting to see what developers build on it, and how they roll some of the ideas back in
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Taking remote imagery offline to Nigeria :: High Earth Orbit
Andrew's notes on trying to source good map data for use in Nigeria. It's a useful overview of a variety of services and ways to use them, though highlighting the absence of really accessible, high-quality data.
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Pulse Laser: The Utility of the Unfinished
"One technique that S&W has been using recently to illustrate design work is placing sketches or wireframes in situ. Whilst wireframes themselves are incomplete artefacts, designed to be work in progress, they still suffer for being uniformly incomplete. Wireframes themselves can be almost too beautiful, and this means that it becomes all-too-easy to criticise them as only wireframes, rather than as part of a product that exists in the world. Contextualising the sketches into the photograph places the design into the world. This enables the design to be understood within the world, and also (importantly) to highlight the seams between the unfinished design and the finished world around it"
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Spike: a log file viewing & (if we’re being generous) analysis tool for Rails developers.
Looks like a handy addition to the toolkit
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Generation Open | FactoryCity
"Sharing and giving away all that you can are the best defenses against fear, obsolescence, growing old, and, even, wrinkles. It isn’t always easy, but it’s how we outlive the shackles of biology and transcend the physicality of gravity." – Perhaps an overly optimistic piece, but it connects together a number of current themes and we can hope…
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Testing Facebook with Cucumber | opensoul.org
For those faced with the unpleasant task of writing facebook apps, some people are working on making sure they can be thoroughly tested.
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scraplab : instant sinatra deployment with heroku
A lot of people seem to be excited about heroku lately, and it does look like a nice simple way to put up quick ruby apps. Must play soon.
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How to speed up gem installs 10x « The Budding Rubyist
Handy little tip, particularly for server environments: turn off ri and rdoc generation in your .gemrc file, and speed things up considerably
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Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden – O'Reilly Radar
A more positive spin on facebook's changes from David O'Recordon, who suspects they're going to pull down the walls around their garden and become a proper citizen of the open web.
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Facebook blinks, copies Twitter, still gets it wrong. – broadstuff
Critical commentary on facebook's recent changes. I'm not sure I entirely agree with statements like "By 2009 it was clear no one gives a sh*t about the Social Graph" but facebook really do seem to be finding that their approach is overly complex and quickly trying to shift to a more twitter-like "web of flow" (to steal Stowe Boyd's phrase)
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Acquia Search goes public beta | Acquia
Hosted solr for drupal: "Acquia Search can be installed as a module on any Drupal 6 site, and enhances a site's search experience with faceted search navigation, content recommendations, and configurable results weighting, all delivered through a redundant hosted service infrastructure.".
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Oauth using pecl/OAuth
Looks like a nice simple way to interact with oauth from a PHP app
Ecampaigning Forum: Notes on Open Space sessions
Apr 12th
While my live blogging efforts focussed on the more formal sessions at ecampaigning forum, most of the event’s time and content was spent in groups following the Open Space methodology. The gatherings for people to suggest sessions were instructive in themselves as they gave considerable hints as to the key concerns of ecampaigning practitioners.
How to engage with the big social networking sites, whether to create your own, organising around big events (such as G8 summits and climate conferences) and ways of managing decentralised/coalition campaigns were some of the big themes, but the sessions covered a wide range beyond that such as engaging with young supporters, or older supporters, choosing content management systems, operating on a tight budget, pooling resources/tools and one hastily agreed discussion of twitter. What follows are a few notes on things that struck me.
The twitter session drew a mixture of existing users, aware onlookers, and newcomers. A lot of time was spent exploring existing uses of the site with examples such as teamtibet’s usage to co-ordinate protests around the olympic flame and Downing Street’s account. Most people seemed taken with its potential for short term co-ordination, but many questions arose about its potential for long term campaigning beyond informing core supporters of news updates. Being seemingly the longest-serving twitter user there, it was interesting to hear responses to a tool I’ve quickly come to take for granted
A recurring theme was the adoption of drupal by a number of the big agencies. Most seem keen to contribute code back to the community, along the lines of AI and CivicActions‘ assets module. I’ve mentioned my mixed feelings about drupal before but am hopeful that through events like this we might be able to resolve some of the issues that frustrate me.
I brought up Russell Davies’ 2008 – the year of peak advertising in conversation over breakfast on the first day and that phrase recurred a few times. There’s a general awareness that the last few years have brought lots of opportunities to attract attention by simply being quick to adopt some new “web 2.0″ tool, but that won’t last. It didn’t seem like there was a sustained discussion or much sense of where to go next, but working hard to attain attention has been the life of campaigners for a long time and so perhaps this is just another step in that journey?
There’s clearly a growing sense of how hard it is to influence big summits where the final communique is often planned months in advance. Gatherings of world leaders are a great opportunity for media coverage and to present the “actionable moments” that Ben Brandzel spoke of, but they’re now when the real chance for change occur. It’s vital to find ways to turn the energy around these summits into sustained, directed action after the final communique is published, planning the next steps before the events themselves take place.
In the session on pooling resources and tools a number of questions came up about the ethics of collaborating with big players like google (who have just been on a big outreach programme for their new Google Earth offering for NGOs). The data provided and the tools offered by the likes of Google can be a great boon to charities operating on tight budgets, but at the expense of ceding a lot of control and a lot of attention data (and with providers like facebook there are concerns about things like this). It was obvious that there is some desire to develop open source tools that provide similar tools, but it’s not clear whether the resources are there. Mention was made of open street map and I brought up the theyworkforyou api, and it definitely would have been interesting to have had people who could present on the usage of that; some concerns remain as to how ready those tools are for non-geeky end-users, which would be easy to resolve if someone were to direct the right resources.
I’m looking forward to seeing what other people bring up in their notes on the event, and what themes come out in the ongoing discussion. You can see my photos on flickr, find some content on technorati and check out the conference wiki for more. All my posts on the topic are gathered under the ecf08 tag.
The MySpace platform: now official
Oct 18th
The rumours of MySpace launching a platform or API have been floating for quite some time, but now as reported on the O’Reilly Radar they have been confirmed.
Over the next two months they are going to increase third-party access to their site. First, they are going to highlight the thousands of widgets that have been on their site for years now. This should be released in the next couple of weeks. I am assuming that it will go beyond the FIM’s Spring Widget Gallery. Second, they are going to offer an API for applications to all developers. However, these applications are going to be sandboxed initially and 1-2 million users will have access to them. If the users deem the applications safe and useful they’ll be available to all users. Developers will be able to advertise in their applications.
It’ll be interesting to see whether the MySpace platform and API are truly a step towards openness or whether it’ll be another walled garden a la facebook. Facebook’s platform is phenomenally successful, but doesn’t really open up their core data (status, events, etc.) for developers to interact with. Given their track record it’s unlikely that MySpace are really going to launch something more open that that.
For developers, and for the musicians whose presence is MySpace’s key calling card, this is a tiny step but not one that makes easier the services that we really need. Musicians still need to update their information across dozens of walled gardens rather than having easy tools to use. Developers still need to scrape and hack if they want to provide a way to access core parts of users’ profile, and unless MySpace address the many, many technical problems on their site (unreliability, apparently random use of captchas, awful HTML) that’s going to remain a huge hassle.
Of course, the key question will be whether this announcement will help MySpace retain their pre-eminent position. The crown has slipped over the last few months, with facebook’s popularity rocketing and people deleting MySpace contacts and accounts in order to focus on just one social network. I suspect MySpace will never get their crown back. If they do, it’ll have to be because they’ve radically changed the social networking game.
Avoiding MySpace (or, cross-posting with WWW::Mechanize)
Apr 3rd
It seems that anyone involved in helping musicians with their web presence has to learn to tolerate MySpace. I don’t think I know anyone who actually enjoys the process of using MySpace, but a strong presence there is a must have for almost every musician these days.
I’ve long wished for a decent API that would help me integrate MySpace with websites I run for musicians—after all, it isn’t very DRY to post the same content in several places when it could be automated—but as time has gone on it’s become clear that an API would be entirely anathema to MySpace’s approach to the web.
So while working on some updates to a friend’s website I decided to try out the Ruby port of WWW::Mechanize to automate the process of posting blog entries over at MySpace.
Firstly, we need to be able to log in. To do that, you can almost copy some of the library’s examples as it’s as simple as:
agent = WWW::Mechanize.new agent.user_agent_alias = 'Mac Safari' page = agent.get('http://www.myspace.com') login_form = page.forms.with.name('theForm').first login_form.email = username login_form.password = password logged_in = agent.submit(login_form)
Posting a blog entry is a little trickier, as MySpace uses javascript to change forms’ ‘action’ attributes based on which button you click, and occasionally inserts tokens in the URLs, but after a little exploration I came up with:
blog_page = agent.get('http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.create&editor=false') blog_form = blog_page.forms.with.name('theForm').first # Here we have to grab the action as it includes a token which can change new_action = blog_page.body.match(/document.theForm.action = '(.+?)'/) blog_form.action = new_action[1] blog_form.subject = subject blog_form.BlogCategoryID = category blog_form.body = body now = DateTime.now blog_form.postMonth = now.month blog_form.postDay = now.mday blog_form.postYear = now.year blog_form.postHour = now.strftime('%I') blog_form.postMinute = now.min blog_form.postTimeMarker = now.strftime('%p') submitted = agent.submit(blog_form) confirm_form = submitted.forms.with.name('theForm').first confirm_form.action = 'http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.processCreate' posted = agent.submit(confirm_form)
And that’s all there is to it. I’m impressed with how easy WWW::Mechanize makes interacting with forms, and generally how pleasant it is to work with. Performance is pretty good too, specially given how problem prone MySpace is. It’s nice to be able to imagine a scenario in which clients can cross-post their content to MySpace. If we’re lucky, we never need actually visit that website again!
I’m working on packaging up the code, probably with support for posting event dates and ‘bulletins’, and adding in error handling to deal with the 75% of the time (based on my usage this afternoon) when MySpace returns an error page. It may be a few days, but I’ll post a note here when it’s ready.
Services_Technorati version 2
Feb 23rd
In an effort to tidy up various older projects that were never quite completed, I’ve turned my attention to my first PEAR module Services_Technorati. It’s a very simple wrapper around the Technorati API, but the PHP4 version never reached a stable release as it depended on some other packages which were also never stabilised.
So it seemed time to make the simple step of converting the code to be PHP5-only and use simplexml for their XML parsing. That removes the dependencies which were slowing me down, and should result in improved speed along the way as the XML parsing is now handled in C rather than PHP. I just released 2.0.0alpha1, but the code should be pretty stable and I’m hoping to run through the steps and get a stable release out very soon.
Update (27th Feb): I’ve just pulled this release and re-released it as 0.7.0. Apparently because the package never release 1.0 in its original version, I should just continue with the previous version numbers despite the change to PHP5.