Make your own feed reader with NewsBlur's new API
blog.newsblur.com
blog.newsblur.com
As some of you know, it's entirely open-source on GitHub (http://github.com/samuelclay) and a number of NewsBlur's users subscribe to NewsBlur's GitHub history, so there's this crazy meta quine-esque feel to coding in the open.
Building an API is hard. I didn't realize it'd be so many moving parts that don't care to align, but comb it over a few dozen times and it's finally there. This is the first API I've built myself, so the obvious things aren't so obvious. Like don't build endpoints that are named /reader/load_single_feed instead of the more RESTful /reader/feed/:id.
If I were to be perfectly RESTful, I'd have PUT and DELETE methods on the same endpoint URLs. But for now the API exists as a bunch of discrete endpoints that each have their own quirks. Smoothing them over is something that will take some experience and some real-world battle testing.
I'd like to think that this goes to show that anybody can build an API (and a service beneath it). I think the consistent message I've had to deal with every single day, even as hard as it got sometimes/always, was to not give up. It's a bit easier now to not give up, but those first few months, when everything broke and nothing worked, and the night would pass and I'd wake up to dead robots, were tough.
Lend me your thoughts. I'd love to hear feedback so I can make this API/service better and improve my own education in the process.
For what it's worth, NewsBlur is so polished, when I went to add a feed to my account I thought to myself: "Shit, I bet this guy will auto-complete the feed URL from well-known feeds" ... then when I popped up the dialog I thought "wow, that is a really big stretch for me to assume/hope for that... I'll cut him some slack if it doesn't.
Of course, it did and I had a little smirk on my face and mumbled "Damn, this guy is good".
No idea what you have planned for the future, but I imagine NewsBlur is one of many-to-be-aquired ventures you will create.
Nice work man, really nice work.
As for being acquired, I feel like it's this myth that great projects get acquired or sold. But I haven't even heard a peep about potential interest. And NewsBlur has hundreds of premium users keeping the servers on at night! You'd be surprised, but I have yet to hear about any interest whatsoever. It's nice to have a profitable project, but if I were in it for the potential acquisition, I would've quit a looong time ago. It's just not worth it (or maybe it is... 10 million, 10 million, no whammy, STOP).
EDIT: I've just seen the login mechanism; I don't think CORS would be useful with this.
I agree, it'd be useful to use some of this data from JavaScript, but only a couple endpoints are publicly accessible (statistics and feed info, really). Everything else depends on the user's subscriptions and intelligence classifiers.
I try to stay out of your way as much as possible. Notice how there's no logo when you're reading your feeds.
Oh, and you should totally go premium. It would make my day. :-) It also helps keep the site running on its 6 servers.
Great app nonetheless!