Category: XML

Gmail Contact Importer

Import your Gmail Contacts the fast and easy way (insert Billy Mays voice here)

My overall objective was to build very simple API that would allow a user to download his/her Gmail contacts and display them in a specific format.

In my opinion a API like this should be very popular amongst the social networking sites.

The API has the capability to be configured to show results in several different formats XML, JSON, and PHP format. The PHP format returns the results in an array format.

The operating format is as follows.

  • Source:contacts
  • Gmail:Username
  • Gmail:Password
  • Format:PHP, or XML, or JSON

http://apime.josephtinsley.com/contacts/{user_name}:{user_password}/{format}

http://apime.josephtinsley.com/contacts/bob:I_luv_Tacos/json

A simple way of including the result set into your PHP web page is to use PHP’s file_get_contents function.

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<?PHP

$results = file_get_contents('http://apime.josephtinsley.com/contacts/{Email_Address}:{Password}/{Format}');
print '<pre>';
print_r($results);
print '<pre>';

?>

*results are limited to 25 contacts right now*
Thanks,
Joe

RSS Auto Discovery, Do it now

Added a dynamic RSS Auto discovery feature to my site today. Yea nothing earth shattering but I thought it was still pretty cool. Then for shsss and giggles I started surfing the web to see who didn’t have one. I was shocked to see that there’s a lot of big named website not taking advantage of this small addition.

For example

  • Mint.com, http://www.mint.com/blog/ – Mint offers a RSS Feed but not a Auto Discovery feature hosted off of the home page. This option is only available to you when you visit the Feedburner hosted page.
  • My.barackobama.com, http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hqblog –  Basically the same thing as Mint.com. You only see this option on the Feedburner hosted page. And not off the home page. (I’m not even going to get into why they are not using the branded feedburner solution.)
  • Whitehouse.gov, http://www.whitehouse.gov/ – They DO offer a RSS Feed and a RSS Auto Discovery option on the home page. Good deal!

This is actually pretty interesting because it’s so simply to implement and in doing so will make things easier for your readers. Part of the game plan is to get people involved, why not make it easier from then to keep up.

So anyway here some code and some links to reference if you want to add this feature to your site.

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<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.josephtinsley.com/feed/rss.xml">

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="ADD SITE TITLE HERE" href="ADD RSS FEED URL HERE"/>

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