David Davies' Radio Weblog

Regular readers of my posts will know I don't particularly like having to read through loads of RSS feed data. There's just too much to read and life's too short. Sometimes I want to get some specific information fast. And maybe another time I want a standing filter of all my feeds so that I can quickly see the latest news on a particular topic.

Well now thanks to radio's web services I can filter all my RSS feeds and only look at those items that match a keyword.

<%params = {"cancer"}; xml.rpc ("147.188.64.44", 5335, "radio.rssSearch", @params)%>

The params = {"cancer"} tells the service to only display those feed items that contain the keyword "cancer". Try this service for yourself on your own site. Try other health-related keywords. All my feeds are health and health education related.

If you like this you can have it for your own site.

Download the web service script here.

Here's the above script in action on my copy of Radio.

Today I released my first public web service. It allows you to include some or all of your pictures in a weblog post or story. It kind of supersedes the old picture gallery script as you can now have a picture gallery wherever you want, including in a template if you so wish! This gives the user a lot more flexibility over how to display groups of images.

If you're not ready to install the web service on your own site then try it via mine! Copy and paste the following macro in a new weblog post in your site:

<%params = {"deganwy"}; xml.rpc ("147.188.64.44", 5335, "radio.picturegallery", @params)%>

The params= {"deganwy"} tells the service to display all those pictures in my site with a filename containing "deganwy". To view all pictures just leave the params field empty thus params = {""}. This is a nice example of how services allow you to both collaborate and interoperate with other weblogs. We could even build a meta picture gallery!

You can download the web service and install it on your own site by right clicking and saving the following file into your Radio:Web Services directory.

Save this link...

Replace the 147.188.64.44 in the macro above with the IP address of the machine running your copy of Radio and bingo! Your own pictures web service.

By all means open the script and look at how it works. There's a commented-out script step that shows you how to log the web service hits. You will find the script in the Radio.root database at user.betty.rpcHandlers.radio.picturegallery.

I've updated the asset manager tool to alow you delete pictures from your weblog. Use the 'Refresh code...' menu option from the tools menu within the Radio application to get the latest version. If you use this new delete feature please be careful. Once a picture's deleted it's deleted, there's no getting it back! And any posts that you made that used the picture will show a broken image icon.

I think I've crashed my remote Radio server! Darn! And I was going to do so much tonight with web services!