Feediscovery
By Julien, on 16 Dec 2009At Superfeedr, we believe we have to do one thing only in the best way it can be done: make feeds real-time.
There are a ton of small feature requests that our users ask for and that aren’t part of this grand scheme. One of the most common ones is feed discovery.
A lot of apps that are built using Superfeedr allow their users to type in any site url. Since Superfeedr only deals with feeds, it means that these apps have to
- Download this specific page,
- Parse the HTML
- Extract the
<link>tags to get the corresponding feed(s) urls.
It’s definitely not a very hard thing to do, yet, there is* absolutely no reason that everybody should write the same code over and over* for that basic purpose. Obviously, you could use great libraries such as feedbag, yet, these libraries are language-centric (Ruby in this case).
We built feediscovery : a simple – in the cloud! – feed discovery API. To use it, send a GET request to http://feediscovery.appspot.com/ with the url parameter from which you’d like to extract feeds from. The app should return a small json string of the feed(s) information (href, title, rel, type).
Example:
GET http://feediscovery.appspot.com/?url=http://blog.superfeedr.com
→ {"href":"http://blog.superfeedr.com/atom.xml","title":"Superfeedr' thoughts","rel":"alternate","type":"application/atom+xml"}
We truly believe web apps are soon to become the next base-component, and will, in many cases, replace libraries, gems, packages, modules.
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