bsteinback0224's blog

I'm pleased to announce a new AOL API has just been released. It's for the AOL Journals service, but is referred to as the Blog API because that's what Journals is underneath. AOL Journals has been hosting blogs for AOL users for over four years, with over a million blogs in use.

What can you do with this API?

Well, of course you can use Feed Readers as always, but now you can also make additions and modifications to blogs programmatically. So, for example, you can create mashups to write user comments to their AOL Journal and also to other services they may want to publish to, or use AOL Journals as a container for comments for your mashup. Let us know what you come up with!

This time I'd like to talk about some of the details in using Javascript to talk to AOL OpenAuth. I'll refer to my sample application Buddylist (Javascript), with source available here.

For security reasons, we want people using a mashup to login to AOL using a separate IFRAME window (we'd rather that our users not have to expose their AOL passwords to third parties, as I'm sure you can understand). This is done simply with the following statement:

Hello again. I've put up a couple of new samples into our Mashup Gallery that should be of interest (scroll down to the "Samples Developed at AOL" section).

They both get (and display) the members of a user's AIM Buddy List. One works from the server side (PHP - a Java sample also should be coming soon, or ping me), and the other from a browser client (HTML/Javascript).

This should be very useful stuff for any Social Application. With a user's Buddy List you can both distribute to and from the user's buddies. So say User A logs into your Mashup. You now use this AIM Buddy List code to have him (or her) OpenAuth into AOL and get their Buddy List. Now you can (say) go to AOL Pictures and see if any of the buddies have Pictures up that User A can now browse (I'll have some samples along that line coming soon).

Hi, I'm the Developer Support Group Technical Support guy. I'm here to help with developer questions. And in order to have some idea what I'm talking about, I also have been starting to program some simple example Mashups myself.

You can find the first one here. It's a simple combination of Mapquest and AOL Pictures, to show a map and pictures of a city or country. Here are some notes that came out of it.

The AOL Pictures API is pretty simple. I concentrated on displaying public pictures by tag. It's a standard HTTP/XML interface, so once we get the user to select a tag to search on we just have to make the following request: