Introducing Net::Feedburner
One thing we don’t do enough of at Six Apart is promote the amazing work that our employees contribute to the Open Source community. Most recently, Nick Gerakines, who is an engineer on our TypePad team wrote a Perl module called Net::FeedBurner which provides a wonderful abstraction layer for managing and burning your feeds using the FeedBurner API. Modules like these are great because they obviate the need for developers to wade through a bunch of XML in order to perform simple functions, plus they provide a cleaner more intuitive set of semantics to use when interacting with third party services like these.
A Brief Talk with Nick, the Creator
I emailed with Nick about this new module briefly and asked him a few questions. Nick is in email, as he is person: to the point.
Because people may not be familiar with you, what tags would you use to describe yourself?
married, software engineer, perl hacker, blogger, cocoa developerWhat was your role on the recent TypePad release, and what led you to create this perl module?
I developed the interface that allows us to communicate with FeedBurner in a way which enables our users to effortlessly use both FeedBurner and TypePad together. Like most of the people that I work with, I’ve always been a big supporter of giving back to the community. Creating a library that other developers could use just felt like a good idea.What is your philosophy when building APIs such as Net::FeedBurner?
Write as little code as possible and keep the footprint small. When modules like this are used in larger applications I try to keep things simple for the sake of the developer using it. I also have a tendancy to write test code first. It allows me to plan the behavior and logic beforehand.What features or plans do you have for the module?
Immediately on the TODO is to add support for the FeedBurner Awareness API. I think being able to get statistical information on your feeds can go a long way. Everybody likes to see the numbers, or at least know they are they if they did want to see them.Are you aware of any other people making use of this toolkit other than Six Apart?
I don’t know of anyone outside of Six Apart using this module, but I hope I’ve made it easy to integrate.Do you have any “special tip or tricks” you would like to share with people using the module?
The test suite ‘Net-FeedBurner/t/*’ covers most all of the common tasks performed with the API. Use it as a quick reference.
Resources
- Net::FeedBurner on CPAN
- Nick Gerakines’ Homepage
- FeedBurner’s Homepage
- FeedBurner’s Feed Management API Reference
Perl Code Sample
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