Half of the work I do these days involves developing bridges between Comcast.net and third parties via web enabled APIs.

Brent Simmons’s The virtues of XML-RPC is a timely read.

So is Jon Udell’s The power of the URL-line where he trumpets the RESTful approach.

A project I am involved in uses both techniques.

Richard Eriksson of Urban Vancouver and Bryght (Drupal hosting services), sent me an email to pass along a solution to my Atom troubles (scroll down to “What If The Site Only Has an Atom Feed?”). It works like a charm.

Mike Krisher’s Blog: Still working on the Atom to RSS solution.

I share Mike’s frustration. Drupal’s (and CivicSpace’s) aggregator can’t handle ATOM and for the vast majority of Blogger.com hosted sites, that’s all you get. I’ve written a script that uses Magpie to parse Atom and output RSS (.91), it works for 85% of the feeds out there, but it’s not up to snuff for release to the general public. Maybe I should and let the community have at it?

RSS: BitTorrent RSS Module from Dave Winer and Adam Curry. Very, very interesting.

Wonder if he’ll release the .fla? In any case, there’s some potential here.

I’m doing more and more third party integration work, much of that done via web based APIs. When I get the chance I’ll be reading this three part series at IBM’s developerWorks.

This open source framework for sprite driven video games could be fun to experiment with.

This is very, very interesting. I’m just going to have to play with this as soon as I get the chance.

OK, many of you are going to scratch your head, but I find this just awesome.

Flash 7’s security model provides a way for servers to authorize your Flash .swfs to load data from them, however, you might run into a host that uses IP based access control.

Old tried and true methods still work – routing your Flash data requests thru a ?Proxy? hosted on the same server as your .swf. This is especially handy when you need to communicate, using XML-RPC, with a remote host somewhere. Apache provides a handy XmlRpcProxyServlet that fits the bill.