XMLRPC API for SL projects

[blom]

Hi,

Since a lot of people here have custom scripts to scrape SL's pages, I thought it'd be easier to have 1 site do that, which can offer the information to the others. This way, we don't all smash the SL server and heck, it's just fun.

So, for now I have a very experimental XMLRPC API available for all of you. The data is updated every 5 minutes, so should be somewhat accurate. The endpoint is http://api.helpmewith.it/xmlrpc and currently it's handling but one methodname, being "openProjects".

This will return you the open projects on SL. The information you'll get is:


project_id
title
description
types
webmaster
status
bids
bid_min
bid_max
bid_avg
created
ends
programmer
featured
private


Some clarification. Types are the job types, like 'PHP', 'Javascript', 'Security', 'Perl/CGI' etc.

"status" will be "open" or "frozen"

"created" and "ends" are timestamps

"programmer" is always empty (or should be), for this is the 'chosen programmer'. It's just in there for no reason yet (might change for say frozen projects etc).

More to come. Hope you like it. Feedback is more than welcome.

Happy Hacking!

[trendywebs]

This is an excellent idea. How about if projects can be selected and refined on the basis of project value, technologies involved etc. That would be very nice rather than going through so many projects searching for a suitable project.

[blom]

This is an excellent idea. How about if projects can be selected and refined on the basis of project value, technologies involved etc. That would be very nice rather than going through so many projects searching for a suitable project.

Sure, it's all possible, yet I believe such filtering is (also) the responsibility of the client querying my api ;-)

I'm looking forward to ideas coming from this!

[Sam]

Here's a better idea... SL could just offer their own API so we don't need to rely on a third party that is scraping pages and costing server resources.

This way, you don't need to scrape to provide the API. The people who continue to use their own API don't need to scrapw, and thus the SL server will be faster.

[blom]

@sam:
Excellent, I can't believe no one ever thought of that! Then again, maybe it's an utopia waiting for SL to implement this, for it will take longer than the misery in Iraq ... so we'll have to go with another solution