One of the coolest things about working on Gimme Bar has been the opportunity to build a platform. While most folks interact with our service via the web site, the site is just one application built on top of the Gimme Bar content collection and curation system. Our web site interacts with the system via our HTTP API, which is open to everyone, not just our internal team. That means that anyone can build applications on top of our platform to suit their own needs or interests.
To demonstrate this, I built GimmeMe, a simple tumblelog-type web app that's powered by Gimme Bar. It uses methods in our API that don't require authentication, so you don't need to register with us to use it. And it's a drop-in, set-one-option-and-go install, so you don't need to fiddle with a bunch of stuff to use it (but you can if you want).
I have a running demo on my web server at http://funkatron.com/GimmeMe. It shows the 50 most recent pieces of content I've grabbed with Gimme Bar.
To install the web app yourself, you'll need a web server with:
Install as follows:
.zip or
.tar.gz from the project's
download page$config['username'] value in
index.php 4 .Optionally set the
$config['gb_addthis_pubid'] value to include AddThis widgets, if you're into that kind
of thingIf you're a developer type, you'll probably want to poke around the source code in the
GitHub repo. The main work is done by libs/GimmeMe.php,
which handles grabbing data from the API, caching it, and rendering the
HTML.
In GimmeMe::getAssets(), we load the data using the GET /public/assets/:username
method. This returns a JSON object with an array of asset data in the
records propert. We decode the response JSON into a PHP
object (the $assets variable), and add a couple properties
that we'll use in the HTML template. Then we cache the object in APC,
and return it. Next time around, if the cached object has not expired,
it will just pull it from APC and return it, so we don't make more
requests to the API than necessary.
The GimmeMe::render() method loops through the assets we
retrieved and makes each one into a GimmeAsset
object. GimmeAssets are view objects used by the Mustache templating
library to encapsulate display logic, so we set up special methods
or data massage in there. After we set those up for each asset, the
entire data structure is passed to the Mustache library for rendering,
using the
'page' template defined in templates\templates.php.
Right now I also am including a a
simple router class at vendors\Router.php. We'll need
this for stuff that would involve different URLs, like paging back
through assets or loading single-asset pages, but I haven't quite gotten
that far.
I'd be remiss in not mentioning http://hereslookingathue.com/, a collection of beautiful imagery collected and organized by Gimme Bar user hereslookingathue. It's another cool example powered by our public API methods.
Hopefully this gives you a taste of what's possible with the Gimme Bar API. Most read-only things, like embeddable widgets or reposting tools, would be easy to do with just the public API methods. Beyond that, the vast majority of our system is exposed through the public API, so powerful collection, replication, and organization applications can be built.
If you have questions or comments, please hit us up on Freenode at #gimmebar-api, or email us at api@gimmebar.com.
Photo by rovingI