Abstractioneer

Tuesday, December 12, 2006 Journals exposes a very complete API for creating and managing blogs, entries, and comments.  I'm working on getting the API documentation up on dev.aol.com sometime soon.  But it's very easy to get started with basic blog posts.  Here's an example using curl, that would post to this blog, if my password were MYPASSWORD:

curl -k -sS --include --location-trusted --request POST --url 'https://journals.aol.com/_atom/journal/panzerjohn/abstractioneer' --data @entry.xml --header 'Content-Type: application/atom+xml; charset=utf-8' --user panzerjohn:MYPASSWORD

where entry.xml is the Atom entry to be created, like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:aj="http://journals.aol.com/_atom/aj#">
<title>Blog entry title</title>
<published></published>
<content type="html">
   Hello World!
</content>
</entry>

On success, you'll see something like this in response:

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 18:21:57 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.54 OpenSSL/0.9.7e mod_jk/1.2.14 mod_rsp20/RSP_Apache2_v6_2.05-08-11:mod_rsp20.so.rhe_x86-3.v8_r1.44
Set-Cookie: RSP_DAEMON=1ceaffc0a8b18da03cfaaea9b70f236f; path=/; domain=journals.aol.com; HttpOnly
Set-Cookie: MC_UNAUTH=1; path=/; domain=journals.aol.com
Location: http://journals.aol.com/_atom/journal/panzerjohn/abstractioneer/entryid=168
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: application/atom+xml;charset=UTF-8

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:aj="http://journals.aol.com/_atom/aj#">
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://journals.aol.com/panzerjohn/abstractioneer/entries/2006/12/12/blog-entry-title/168" />
<link rel="http://journals.aol.com/service.edit" type="application/atom+xml" 
  href="http://journals.aol.com/_atom/journal/panzerjohn/abstractioneer/entryid=168" />
<link rel="http://journals.aol.com/comments" type="application/atom+xml" title="Comments feed for this entry" 
  href="http://journals.aol.com/panzerjohn/abstractioneer/entries/2006/12/12/blog-entry-title/168/atom.xml" />
<id>tag:journals.aol.com,2003:/panzerjohn/abstractioneer/168</id>
<title type="text"><![CDATA[Blog entry title]]></title>
<updated>2006-12-12T18:21:00Z</updated>
<published>2006-12-12T18:21:00Z</published>
<author>
<name>panzerjohn</name>
</author>
<aj:entrySource>AtomAPI</aj:entrySource>
<aj:mood>0</aj:mood>
<aj:commentCount>0</aj:commentCount>
<content type="html"><![CDATA[   Hello World!]]></content>
</entry>
 

There are a lot of other parts of the API, but they're best left for a full document rather than a blog post.  There's also at least one known bug, where our servers don't accept the 'xhtml' content type.  That should be fixed on beta.journals.aol.com this Wednesday.



panzerjohn at 10:25:00 AM PST Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this

This entry has 1 comments: (Add your own)

• #1 Comment from diyincite 
  12/12/06 10:13 PM | Permalink

  This is very interesting. It implies that you could use any device that has capability to send a message to a web server to post a blog. For example, the device might be a cellphone with Web access. Cool!