The TypePad API is used primarily by Motion, but as we (and you!) build more kinds of sites with it, I hope we can show them off here. One interesting API site we've built is called Make A Face.
Like Motion sites, Make A Face is a community based site: when viewers join it, it shows up in the “Communities” list in the sidebar of the member's profile. (You can see it on mine here.) The photos posted to the site are also stored in a group, not in a blog.
Unlike Motion, Make A Face uses a Flash based photo uploader to take a picture from your computer's webcam. As you can only post photos, Make A Face can use the gridded view instead of the stream of posts view as on a regular blog or community blog. If you're interested in seeing more about Make A Face, it's on GitHub (and so is the Flash webcam widget).
Searching faces
For customizing an application, the TypePad API puts other tricks up our sleeve. Originally I had wanted to add a view to the Make A Face application to find the last face someone posted; to do that, I had to write Django code, and figure out how to call it from a web page. However, the search API lets us do it directly from TypePad.
What we call the search API is really the assets bare noun endpoint. This endpoint lets us search a blog, group, or even all of TypePad for a certain set of keywords. However, if we use some filters, we don't really need to provide a query string. (Using filters by themselves can be slow; if you can, provide a text query in the q argument.)
As we want to filter to a particular TypePad author's assets, first we need that author's url ID. The fastest way to get the is to go to this page and enter your profile alias, or the name the address of your TypePad profile uses. My profile is at http://profile.typepad.com/markpasc, so my profile alias is markpasc, and the url ID tool tells me mine is 6p00d83451ce6b69e2. This is what we'll use for the filter.author parameter in the search.
For groups, the url ID is a little harder to find. If it's your application, you'll find the group ID in that application's details on the Account → Developer page of TypePad. For Make A Face, the group ID is 6p0120a7ea2e1c970b, so that's our filter.group.
With those settings, we can now write the code to do that:
<div>
<a id="lastface" href="#"><img src="http://static.typepad.com/.shared/images/1.gif" width="120" height="120"></a>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function () {
$.ajax({
url: 'http://api.typepad.com/assets.js',
dataType: 'jsonp',
data: {
'filter.author': '6p00d83451ce6b69e2',
'filter.group': '6p0120a7ea2e1c970b',
'max-results': 1
},
success: function (data) {
var post = data.entries[0];
var imageUrl = post.imageLink.urlTemplate.replace('{spec}', '120si');
$('#lastface').attr('href', post.permalinkUrl)
.find('img').attr('src', imageUrl);
}
});
});
</script>
You can try out this code here. I hope this gives you some ideas about how you might use the search API to remix your TypePad content. As always, if you have questions or comments about the API, feel free to share them here or elsewhere.
