Recorded another quick podcast on the way to church this morning, on learning how to get stuff out of MT and onto a page…
Drivetime Debrief - Getting the stuff from the place to the thing
Quick recording today on the way home on how I get into a new platform, touching on Wordpress, Drupal, Movable Type and more.
As described in my last post, I’ve been working on documenting the kuler REST API. Last night I whipped up an RSS feed for any user’s themes. You’ll have to visit the page and login to get the link, but after that the feed will work even without logging in.
I also created a page that just grabs a single theme - each theme in the feed now links to this page as a permalink. Finally, I figured out the download url and the feed description should contain the ASE download link.
Geekery ahead.
I really love Adobe’s new social app, kuler, built around creating, tagging, and sharing color themes. The interface is gorgeous, and the ability to download themes into Photoshop and Illustrator is a great feature.
However, as a social app, kuler is not very social. It exists completely as a Flash application, and there are no features that allow the sharing of information created in the kuler space with anything outside it. At the least, I wanted an RSS feed of my themes that I could aggregate on DELICIOUSLYMETA.
Based on some information gleaned from a blog comment by a kuler employee, I installed the excellent network tool WireShark (née Ethereal) and started watching the traffic between the Flash app and Adobe’s servers.
Sure enough, kuler uses a REST-style API based on http calls t the server that return XML documents representing the data. I’ve first wrote some PHP code to test it, and then started documenting the API at http://deliciouslymeta.com/kuler/. I’ve only got the basics documented yet, but over time I’ll get more of it down. At some point I hope to be able to offer RSS feeds for a user’s themes.
My goal in this project is not to “hack’ Adobe’s cool new app, but to show how the API model they use is actually a great foundation for a social app. Hopefully they will publicize and document the API in the near future and this experiment will be obsolete.
Read an early draft of my Personal Platform.
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