Friday, August 29, 2008

Feature of the week: Updated JSON feed

In one of our last posts, we announced the availability of a JSON feed in BibSonomy. It was meant as a lightweight way to get tag clouds for publications only. Since popularity of JSON increased and we got requests to include feeds for other pages as well, we decided to implement JSON feeds for all pages. Those feeds are now available!

For every BibSonomy page you can get a JSON feed of it by prepending json/ to the path part of the URL, e.g., to get the JSON feed for http://www.bibsonomy.org/tag/json, use the page http://www.bibsonomy.org/json/tag/json.
This returns you an Exhibit compatible JSON feed which includes all bookmark and publication posts of the respective page. To include the JSON feed into your Exhibit, add a link to it into the header of your Exhibit HTML code:
<link href="http://www.bibsonomy.org/tag/json?callback=cb" 
type="application/jsonp" 
rel="exhibit/data" 
ex:jsonp-callback="cb" 
/>

Have a look at the list of Andreas' publications to see, what is possible using JSON and Exhibit with only some lines of HTML!

Users of our existing JSON feed should note that the format changed slightly to adopt it to Exhibit's conventions:
  • The tags are now contained in the list with key items and not tags.
  • The name of the tag is expressed using the key label and not name.
  • There are two more lists (types and properties) to allow easier Exhibit integration.

We've already updated the available tag cloud script to fit to the new layout.