Mevio Developer News

As we start updating and building our new APIs here at PodShow, I have to wonder which format most people prefer. I know internally here at the office, everyone has their own preference and experiences, but what do YOU want? The current Authoring API is built utilizing XMLRPC but we are planning on updating the APIs eventually and creating the new ones in different formats.

So if you have a preference, now is your chance to speak up! Leave a comment in the blog or send audio/video comments to developers@podshow.com and we will work them into a future Devcast and publish them to the site.

I personally like REST, but that is just one mans opinion.

The Introduction
Being that this is my first post to the PodShow developer blog, let me take a second to introduce myself. My name is Chris McIntyre. You may know me from Podcast Alley, the site I developed and still maintain or you may know me from my profile at PodShow (ferf.podshow.com), either way I am excited to be working on the developer community with Andrew and Adam! I have been in the podcasting world since November of 2004 (almost 3 years now, holy cow) and am still loving the changes that podcasters are making in the world and in new media!

What I Do Here
I will be driving the PodShow developer community and have the following goals in mind:

• To help advance the proliferation of podcasting and new media to the world
• To work work along side developers to create cool stuff
• To promote great tools, code, applications and websites that promote podcasting
• To help podcasters find their audience and to engage them
• To make it easy for people to use & update PodShow content from outside the network
• To have fun!

PodShow set out to create a place where there were no barriers to entry for people who were creative and who wanted to get their audio and video work to the world. This is still our mission, and the developer network will continue down that path. Any way we can help people interact with their audience, to find a new audience, to create great content and to have fun doing it… we want to promote that here. With that said, let me recap what we do have already and what is coming up.

What We Have, and What’s Coming Up

• Podcast Publishing API - (documentation)
  Many people don’t know it, but PodShow has an Authoring API that allows you to build applications and services that will publish podcast episodes and related details (title, keywords, descriptions, etc) to PodShow. There are already a few applications that work with it too including: Castblaster, Vidblaster, Ubercaster and Ecto.
• Module Creation SDK - (documentation)
  This one is mostly complete, but not fully implemented yet. We provide an SDK where you can develop your own modules for profiles on the PodShow website. The SDK gives you everything you need to develop and test your modules. Submit them to us and once we review them we can release them for use on the PodShow site.
• Channel API (coming soon)
  Since collecting and sharing content is such a cool feature on PodShow, this will be one of the next areas we focus on. If you have comments on how you think this should work, feel free to email me (info@podcastalley.com) and let me know!
• Lots of RSS & OPML Feeds
  From the PodShow APIs page you can find links to lots of OPML and RSS feeds for Podcast Alley and the PodSafe Music Network. These feeds are updated all of the time and represent a good selection of content from those websites.

I guess that is a good start for now, so let me go ahead and rap this up :) I am excited to be working with you all and to getting a lot of cool new stuff going soon, with your help. As always, if you need help or have suggestions you can email me at developers@podshow.com.

We ran into a few kinks on the server end of the authoring API with an OS X product. I’m pleased to report that we’ve updated the API handler to filter out all that extra stuff that the Mac framework adds to its base64 payload. May a thousand Apple trees bloom ;-)

The API endpoint is back up as of 13:50 PDT.

Hey just a quick heads up to folks working on support for the authoring api. We hit a bug, and are working on it now. Until it’s fixed you may see some errors. I’ll update the blog when we’re back up.

Update 13:50 PDT: We’re back up.

It’s a big day today on developer.podshow.com. We’ve posted a draft of the Authoring API. Its purpose is to allow third-party tools to upload content into the network. It’s based on the metaWeblog API, a standard from the blogging world that a number of pre-existing tools already implement. The API has been live in production for a few months, with members of the PodShow network posting their content through CastBlaster. We’ve also tested the API against one blog tool, Ecto, with success. I suspect and hope that the API will work out of the box with other tools we haven’t checked yet (please do let me know!).

Now we’d like to invite tool developers in to review the documentation and provide feedback, help us find and fix passages that are unclear, let us know about other tools that work with the API, and provide general feedback. Are we missing any key calls? Did we goof up the arguments somewhere? Etc etc.

I’d also like to say a big thanks to Dave Winer, the author of the metaWeblog API, for reviewing a draft of the documentation and uncovering a couple of bugs, now fixed, in our implementation.

Please use the comment thread on this post for feedback. Thanks!!!

>> PodShow Authoring API

Just a note from the foundry here at HQ. We’ve been watching the feedback, positive and negative, and taking it all in. This is one of the best aspects of going to open beta.

Please keep at us with your feedback, suggestions and criticisms. We might not get to them immediately — up front much of the work has been behind the scenes, on the mundane-yet-critical task of scaling up our systems — but as you’d expect we’re watching the inbound links and have subscribed our trusty aggregators to the relevant ego feeds.

You’ll have seen by now that we fixed the XML button linkage. Adam’s written about it on Curry.Com and talked about it on DSC 417. Maybe we’ll even rehash it again on the next devcast. We’ll also be getting our own XML into ship-shape, adding a few critical elements to make it more aggregator and net-friendly. So I pre-emptively stake my claim: it ain’t all gonna be perfect out of the starting gate, and if you see something that doesn’t look right, we may be working on it already, and in any case, just speak up, we’re listening! AG

CastBlaster v0.68 beta is out!

The first release of the PodShow+ Module SDK is available for download. Many thanks to Tomas Salfischberger for reviewing a pre-release version. A frequently asked questions sheet is taking shape here.

We’ve got the PodShow PDN working with CastBlaster and at least one standard blogging app. If you’re working on the authoring end, take a minute to review the metaWeblog API and especially the newMediaObject call. Our implementation hews very close to vanilla metaWeblog though there are a few podcast-specific aspects to how we use the standard function calls. I’ve drafted a developer doc and am tweaking it in preparation for review. More to come.