Glue for Technorati API

Posted by Dave Winer, 5/11/03 at 8:11:00 AM.

Dave Sifry has kindly provided a way to access the data in Technorati using XML over HTTP.

How to install 

For Radio newbies (welcome!)..

1. You can download the code here.

2. Download the file locally.

3. Launch Radio, bring the Radio application to the front.

4. Choose Open from the File menu.

5. Choose the file.

6. Follow Dave's instructions for getting an apiKey, then run technorati.init and enter the key into user.technorati.prefs.apiKey.

Questions? 

Please ask questions about this on the Technorati developer's mail list. I won't be able to answer one-to-one questions about this code.

Feedback 

Dave Sifry asked for feedback so here goes.

It's a harder to work with than XML-RPC. Instead of minutes, it took about an hour or so to get together a table of glue scripts. I had to reimplement a large chunk of XML-RPC. It's probably harder on the server end too. This is a fragile way to connect apps, at a code level. And despite what you say -- you don't need a WSDL for XML-RPC or SOAP. That's not a reason to not use the higher-level toolkits. They're good because they solve problems that we have to re-solve to work with your API. Extra work? Well it was relaxing the first time, but when you changed the API this morning it was annoying.

I think the appkey thing is dorky, I wish Google hadn't gotten this started, but there you go -- it's a tradition. But Big Dave, you're the king of servers. Couldn't you write monitoring code that would determine if one IP address was hitting the API more than 500 times a day? Is it worth making the user jump through this hoop when you could solve the problem once in your server software? It's another fragile thing, and a support nightmare. I'm going to refer all the users with problems to you. ;->

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