filicio.us blog

We’ve just added RSS to filicio.us, so all (public) files can now be downloaded via feeds. Feed URLs look like this:

• http://filicio.us/rss/demo/ (most recent public files published by demo)
• http://filicio.us/rss/demo/podcast (most recent public files published by demo tagged podcast)
• http://filicio.us/torrentrss/demo (most recent public files published by demo, but for BitTorrent applications)

This is the easy way of getting the standard rss feeds. In fact, the feeds has been added as a part of the filicio.us API, which means than any API request with format=rss specified will be returned as RSS. A few examples:

• http://filicio.us/get-files?format=rss&username=demo&password=demo&limit=100&orderby=creation_date&order=desc (Get all the 100 most recent files — private and public — uploaded by demo)
• http://filicio.us/get-files?format=rss&username=demo&mode=search&search=superman (Get a list of demo’s public files where either the filename or the description includes the string “superman”)

(And yes, I realize that it’s time to actually write some API documentation. This thing has grown out of the sparse blog doc.)

(Refer to this blog post for an introduction of the api, and a listing of the basic options)
I’ve added a few more options to the “api”, which means that you can now retrieve a list of private files through the api (by sending the password that goes with the username, obviously), and you’re no longer limited to listing files by only one tag.

This means that you can now:

• http://filicio.us/get-files?username=demo&password=demo (get demo’s private and public files)
• http://filicio.us/get-files?username=steffentchr&mode=tag&tag=ip&tag=egnenoter&tagmode=or (list all of my files tagged either ip or egnenoter)
• http://filicio.us/get-files?username=steffentchr&mode=tag&tag=ip&tag=egnenoter&tagmode=and (list all of my files tagged ip and egnenoter)
• http://filicio.us/get-files?username=demo&mode=tag&tag=first&tag=second&password=demo (list all demo’s files — private and public — tagged either first or second)

If you really want to be Web 2.0 these days, true ajax’ing (as in fullfilling the holy trinity by doing async, javascript and xml at once) is not enough: You also need an api. And when you’ve got the xml thing down, you’re almost there, so after a few minutes of hacking, we’re ready to introduce our very own file sharing api.

Another very important part of the whole Web 2.0 universe is sparse documentation, so we’ll simply explain the api with a few links to my public files:

• http://filicio.us/get-files?username=steffentchr
• http://filicio.us/get-files?username=steffentchr&mode=user_recent (30 most recent files)
• http://filicio.us/get-files?username=steffentchr&mode=untagged
• http://filicio.us/get-files?username=steffentchr&mode=tag&tag=metode

(There’s probably more to come, but this should illustrate the basics…)