Looking at identi.ca support, and…
…I’m not sure what I’m supposed to use for the API URL? Apparently, the http://identi.ca/api root is broken. So… what am I supposed to use instead? Just for yucks, I tried http://identi.ca/api w/ wget at the command line. Lo and behold, it doesn’t work, just as advertised.
Ultimately I’d love to be able to support all kinds of status.net services, but I think it makes the most sense for identi.ca to be the first. Can anyone help me out here? What’s a working root of the API URL for identi.ca?
I suppose if I were feeling really ambitious I could look at the source for Gwibber. *sigh*
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 17th, 2010 at 10:10 and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
10 Responses to “Looking at identi.ca support, and…”
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Evan Prodromou Says:
Saying “the API root link is broken” is a misunderstanding. True, there’s no resource at http://identi.ca/api, but that’s just because it’s not clear to us what should be at that API root. Twitter’s API root, for example, just shows the Twitter home page.
You can, however, use all the methods from Identi.ca. For example,
http://identi.ca/api/statuses/public_timeline.xml
What do you think would make sense at that root URL? A redirect to the public timeline in the API? A redirect to the HTML version of the home page? Instructions on using the API?
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Mike Says:
Evan – you’re absolutely right. The API is working fine for me, I should’ve updated my post when I discovered this. To answer your question, I’m not really sure what should go at the root… a 404 doesn’t seem *quite* right (although, I suppose it’s technically true that you’re requesting a non-existent resource). Perhaps some other 400 level error (403?) with an HTTP status message indicating that the API root is invalid???
Anyhow, sorry that I didn’t update the post once I realized the other API calls (like public_timeline) do in fact work. And thanks for stopping by!
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Zach Says:
Hey Mike,
Sorry for the confusion. I think we call it the “API root” because although the pattern of the paths to the API resources is consistent, the domain name and path of each StatusNet site itself can vary.
e.g.:
http://identi.ca/api
http://example.status.net/api
http://zach.copley.name/statusnet/apietc.
We’ll put it on our TODO list to actually put some sort of human intelligible resource at the API root. It’s pretty safe to assume if someone actually hits the API root they’re poking around the API, so it would be nice to have a welcome message or something instead of a 404.
If you have any questions or concerns about using StatusNet API, feel free to send me an email zach [at] status.net, or hit me up on Identi.ca (@zach).
Zach
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MediaWiki has a nice welcome page for their API documentation. I think there’s some real value in providing something of the kind for StatusNet.
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Gary Says:
I’m probably shooting the gun a bit (and I’m not one of these people to go to new projects and request every single feature known to man), but would it be better to implement identi.ca as an add-on in the same way as Firefox et al?
I probably sound a bit daft (I’m having a Mad Mozilla Moment on my computer at the moment), but the one thing that really sets the Mozilla and XUL platform at the moment is the extensibility through a common add on system.
Also the open-source fascist in my head is telling me to say that you should probably use identi.ca as the default social messaging service
Fantastic work you have here, anything I can help with my decent html knowledge and basic javascript knowledge just give me a buzz…
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bogdanbiv Says:
I think you should put some kind of help page at the API root – sort of a man page/Help Contents.
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@Gary – That was one of the original plans, actually, and I think it’s an awesome idea. Unfortunately, I have a lot less time to work on Buzzbird now than when I was just starting out, and that is one of the things that has gone to the back burner.
I hope to make a UI overhaul one of the goals of the 0.9 release, and that may (if I can get to it) include support for theming, which would be the first foray into add-on type functionality. Once I see how that goes, I’ll probably get a better idea w/ what’s involved in getting full-blown extensions to work.
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raphael Says:
I would highly appreciate status.net-support. Any news on that?
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@raphael – identi.ca support is checked into master and will be available in the next release, which should be within the next week or two. There is no UI for general status.net support yet, but it should be quite easy to implement now that a status.net backend has been implemented for identi.ca.
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@Mike That’s cool. I did a checkout of the latest code, merged the new files with my local installation (I’m on a mac) and replaced the urlBase with our status.net API and it works. But maybe I have done something wrong: I can’t open the preferences, the mouse over images aren’t displayed and I don’t see any growl notifications, but maybe notifications aren’t enabled in the preferences. Thanks so far!
