RSS via NNTP is certainly not a new concept – I first read about the idea on Matt Webb‘s site almost three years ago. More recently there’s been mention over at Jon’s (Crossing the bridge of weak ties), and Ben’s (RSS to NNTP and HEP Messaging Server). This week, Ben had mentioned the Panopticon in [...]
Was I asleep in parts of 2002? Or is my memory really as bad as people tell me it is? Of course Amazon offer consumable XML. Now that an email from Chanticleer has jogged my grey matter, I have found this which looks extremely promising. Interesting times ahead for me, although at first glance it [...]
While experimenting with wishlist data, it occurred to me that it might be desirable to have one’s wishlist exposable directly from a URL, and in a consumable format. This would lend itself quite nicely to URL pipelining. I hacked up a very simple module, WWW::Amazon::Wishlist::XML (keeping to the original namespace in CPAN) which acts as [...]
I just discovered that while the CPAN module WWW::Amazon::Wishlist pulled ASINs out of amazon.co.uk-based wishlists, it seems not to be able to find ASINs in amazon.com-based ones. I guess that the HTML layout that the module is scraping has changed. Or at least the hrefs that the module is pulling the ASINs from. While lamenting [...]
Now that I can monitor comments about books I have in my AllConsuming collection, I thought it would be nice to add those books in my Amazon wishlist to that AllConsuming collection so that I could see what people were saying about the books I wanted to buy. So I hacked up a few scripts, [...]
Agreeing with Sam on what content-type should be used for the weblog’s feed (basically it should be whatever you specify in your link tag for that feed), last night I changed the appropriate Blosxom template file, content_type.rss, so that “application/rss+xml” would be sent out with the Content-Type header accompanying the RSS XML. Unfortunately it broke [...]
A while ago, inspired by others, I was looking at adding metadata to this weblog in the form of link rel=’…’ tags that link to related resources. The classic use of such tags in weblogging is for a weblog to point to its RSS feed. Cut to the present, and Piers and I are thinking [...]
allconsuming.net has a SOAP interface. Nice and easy to call and use. But for those (including me) who (also) have a REST bent, there is also a tip-o’-the-hat style flavour that has interesting possibilities. The (readonly) methods are also available as URLs like this: http://allconsuming.net/soap-client.cgi?hourly=1 or http://allconsuming.net/soap-client.cgi?friends=1&url=http://www.pipetree.com/qmacro where the methods are “GetHourlyList()” (hourly=1) and “GetFriends()” [...]
It seems that beyond carrying syndication information, RSS is a very useful and flexible way to get all sorts of application data pushed to a user over time. In the same way that a web browser is a universal canvas upon which limitless services and information can be painted, so (in an albeit much smaller [...]
At one end of the spectrum, along which building blocks for future cooperative web applications lie, we have the library software vendors who were unwitting participants in a great web service experiment “LibraryLookup” built and described by Jon in a recent InfoWorld column. While I’m sure everything is fine now, I don’t think their initial [...]