myFeedz Development Blog

With today’s update, we declare the first version of the API fully implemented. The new features allow you to issue two new query types: claimed feeds and saved articles.

Claimed feeds

This feature allows you to track your writing habits, which can spread over a number of different web sites. To take advantage of it, you need to add to your profile all the feeds you contribute to, then “claim” them by checking the green flag to their right, on the feeds page.

Note that the claiming process doesn’t force you to actually prove you’re the author, as there aren’t any bonus points for contributing to more feeds :). This is merely a way to differentiate the feeds you contribute to from those you just read, as you can later query them through the API. Example uses:

• if you run a blog network, you can combine all feeds and display a list of articles from all blogs onto your pages;
• if you contribute to a number of different blogs, you can get a tag cloud of your posts from all sites, tracking everything you write about.

Saved articles

One of the nice features of myFeedz is the ability to save articles for later reading, like newspaper clippings. We’ve also made it possible to get the list of saved articles through the API. You can use this as a “currently reading” feature on your weblog.

See the filtering and sorting section from the API docs for exact implementation details.

Performance improvements

Together with the bigger updates to the API, we also worked pretty hard to speed up the site for faster load times — especially the homepage should load visibly faster now.

In the last month or so we focused all of our efforts on implementing an API that helps myFeedz users pull content from our database of articles into their own websites. As the docs say:

Its primary audience is made up of power bloggers and other technology enthusiasts that can use it as a tool to track down information and trends in the news. A couple of use cases that we thought of are:

• automatic tagger for your blog posts;
• keep track of your reading interests with a tag cloud of your profile;
• display a tag cloud for your blog or blogs (thus tracking your writing interests);
• display content related to your posts — find out who is writing about the same things that you do;
• display articles from a certain topic and perform custom searches.

In order to use the myFeedz API you have to sign-up for a free account and you will receive an API key, required by all the calls made to the API. You can find your API key under the profile page of your account.

Feel free to use it for whatever you have in mind, as the API arguments allow for pretty creative queries, like the ones you can find in the examples section of the docs. All the examples there, as well as the two badges in the sidebar of this blog (Hot Topics and Top Articles) use the actual API, so you can get a pretty good idea about how the output looks like.

Usability improvements

In this update, we also rolled in a pretty useful feature to the signup and manage OPML pages. If you have an account with another online RSS reader—we currently support Bloglines, Google Reader, Rojo, NewsGator Online and myEarthLinkReader—, a small wizard will assist you in importing your current subscriptions into myFeedz, so that we can provide you with a custom profile based on your interests, all in a much easier process.

Happy coding!