Accessing the Newsgator API within PHP

Posted on November 25, 2005 by Karl

Shelley Powers published a short tutorial on accessing Newsgator via its API and PHP. I’m working with the code and fleshing out a wrapper library I hope to release shortly. I’m fairly sure using Newsgator judiciously will help alleviate the hosting problems I’ve been facing as Philly Future grows, and allow me to add some interesting new features. We shall see.

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6 Responses to Accessing the Newsgator API within PHP

  1. BillSaysThis says:
    November 25, 2005 at 1:29 pm

    How is NewsGator used for PhillyFuture?

  2. Karl says:
    November 25, 2005 at 3:07 pm

    At the moment – not. But I have a strong feeling I can use it to help determine which of our member feeds have updated, before we go out to consume them. That will save considerable bandwidth costs and CPU utilization.

    I think. Actually – I feel real good about it :)

  3. BillSaysThis says:
    November 25, 2005 at 3:13 pm

    better than just monitoring weblogs.com or something similar?

  4. Karl says:
    November 25, 2005 at 3:55 pm

    In a way – yes. Weblogs.com makes available changes.xml once per hour. It includes EVERY blog that has pinged it in the last hour. That’s a huge, mega huge file to get and parse.

    I am only interested in n-number of the 300 blogs that we aggregate. I can set up subscriptions for these in Newsgator and then monitor them from there.

    I think. Pretty sure at least :)

  5. Karl says:
    November 25, 2005 at 4:22 pm

    Another option that is close to this is the Bloglines Sync API: http://bloglines.com/services/api/sync – which might, in the end, be simpler to use, but is not as feature rich. I would have to manually add/delete subscriptions myself – which would suck.

    Damn shame. All I really want is a webservice that will let me know when is the last time that specific feed has been updated. That’s it.

  6. Chris Meller says:
    December 2, 2005 at 8:24 pm

    I was Googling to see if anyone else had created a PHP wrapper for the NG API, and the closest thing I saw was Shelley’s post (which you referenced). She’s off to basically the same start I made (both using NuSOAP), but only coded a fraction of the total functionality.

    If you plan on continuing to pursue this option for your own evil purposes, you may be interested in my NewsGator API Class, which is about half complete (just a matter of adding the remaining functions for their API, as per the existing pattern).

    You can find everything related to my code at: http://incoherentcode.com/projects/newsgator-api-class/

    If you do happen to finish / add to what I’ve started, I’d really appreciate it if you’d pass it back along. I would really like to use this class eventually, but I just don’t have time to finish it AND code an app that uses it… Good luck, hope you find my work thus far to be useful!