Thursday 20 May 2010

Fiddling with Google Buzz

I woke up this morning and, inspired by Ian Bicking's post, thought I'd take a look at showing my last N Buzz posts on my website: http://www.oshineye.com

I started with the example code from here: http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/v1/getting_started.html which makes a request for a JSON object representing all of a user's public posts. Then I tweaked it a little so that it uses my numeric identifier rather than my username. This is in order to avoid leaking my email address. I also changed it so it only shows the last 5 items. I then added a little bit of code to extract the link for each item.

Working out how to traverse the JSON object was made easier thanks to DeWitt's JSON indent project: http://code.google.com/p/appengine-json-indent/

It meant that I only had to work out how to read this: http://json-indent.appspot.com/indent?url=https://www.googleapis.com/buzz/v1/activities/105037104815911535953/@public?alt=json rather than: https://www.googleapis.com/buzz/v1/activities/105037104815911535953/@public?alt=json

After that I only had to tweak the appearance to fit in with the rest of my, rather old-fashioned, website. Hopefully someone will take this code and turn it into a proper widget that can easily be re-used.


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