September 21, 2003

New Technorati API calls, part I

I've been working three new Technorati API calls.  The first is called getinfo.  It tells you things that Technorati knows about a user.  In the simplest case you can use  getinfo to find out information that a blogger wants to make known about himself, along with some information that Technorati has calculated and verified about that person.

http://api.technorati.com/getinfo?username=dsifry (experts, see expert note below)

This will return an XML structure with information about the user.  Here's an example of the XML returned:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!-- generator="Technorati API version 0.9 /getinfo" -->
<!DOCTYPE tapi PUBLIC "-//Sifry Consulting//DTD TAPI 0.01//EN" "http://api.technorati.com/dtd/tapi-001.xml">
<tapi version="0.9">
<document>
<result>
<username>dsifry</username>
<thumbnailpicture>http://www.technorati.com/progimages/photo.jpg?uid=1&amp;mood=default</thumbnailpicture>
<item>
  <weblog>
    <name>Sifry's Alerts</name>
    <url>http://www.sifry.com/alerts</url>
    <rssurl>http://www.sifry.com/alerts/index.rdf</rssurl>
    <inboundblogs>150</inboundblogs>
    <inboundlinks>184</inboundlinks>
    <lastupdate></lastupdate>
    <foafurl>http://www.sifry.com/alerts/foaf.rdf</foafurl>
  </weblog>
</item>
</result>
</document>
</tapi>

The document is broken up into two sections: The first part describes some information that the user (dsifry) wants to allow people to know about himself.  This information is available in HTML form at:
http://www.technorati.com/profile/dsifry
In this case, all the personal information that I want you to know about me is my username, and a link to a picture of myself, and the blogs I author.  The second part of the document is a listing of the weblogs that the user has successfully claimed and the information that Technorati knows about these weblogs. This is the default, by the way.  You'll see lots of information in there, like the Name and URL of each blog, its RSS feed (if it exists), number of bloggers who are currently linking to it, when it was last updated, and some other optional data, like a link to a FOAF file, or GeoURL. 

More to come, including information on the validate API call, which is built to make it easy to validate blog and comment postings...

(Expert note: This is a RESTful call, as with all the Technorati API calls, you can use GET or POST to the http://api.technorati.com/getinfo URI) Posted by dsifry at September 21, 2003 10:31 PM | TrackBack | View blog reactions
Comments

I claimed my blog again per your comment to my post. The code was the same as in all the previous, automatic email responses; nevertheless, I replaced the existing code in my Main Index Template with that most recent snippet. So far, no difference., i.e., my weblog remains unclaimed.

Posted by: Jonathan Smith at September 22, 2003 6:10 AM

Will we be able to access author information via a URL if we don't know the user name?

i.e. http://api.technorati.com/getinfo?url=http://thinkbox.blogware.com

Posted by: Brendyn Alexander at September 22, 2003 9:55 AM