The Vodka God ([info]allah_sulu) wrote in [info]lj_dev,
@ 2008-04-17 21:22:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
User Data

There are a variety of links listed on http://www.livejournal.com/bots/ for acquiring data by means other than "screen-scraping" user pages; including friend data and interest data in a convenient line-separated format. Does LiveJournal provide any similar mechanism for getting a journal/community's list of userpics or tags? Because those are the ones that my program is currently "screen-scraping" (but only when requested by the user, with the results saved).


(Post a new comment)


[info]ciaran_h
2008-04-28 07:27 am UTC (link)
The LiveJournal client/server protocol allows you to get a list of tags, but only for a user for which you have authentication data (or a community for which the authenticated user is a member) with the "getusertags" command.

Other than that, the only way I know to get tags without screen-scraping is with the user's RSS or Atom feed, but of course that doesn't give you the whole list, just the tags used on recent entries. My suggestion would be to screen-scrape the /tag/ list, but do it with ?format=light so that you don't have to deal with all sorts of different styles.

I don't think it's possible to get a list of userpics without screen-scraping, unfortunately. :/ I was wrong on this point - see [info]potolo's comment below about an XML listing of userpics.

You could always try [info]suggestions to see if they can provide any, but that'll take some time.

Edited at 2008-04-28 12:50 pm UTC

(Reply to this)(Thread)

[info]allah_sulu
2008-04-28 05:00 pm UTC (link)
I already used your tip for tags and [info]potolo's for userpics. Thanks.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]potolo
2008-04-28 12:17 pm UTC (link)
An Atom feed of journal/community userpic information is provided, and is described in the XML Userdata chapter of the docs. An example URI is http://exampleusername.livejournal.com/data/userpics.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

[info]allah_sulu
2008-04-28 05:02 pm UTC (link)
Thanks!

(Reply to this)(Parent)

Create an Account
Forgot your login?
Login w/ OpenID
English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…