API for Comments

darryl · October 11, 2007

Hey -- are you guys ever gonna provide a hook into comments? If you aren't going to support [thread=73349]Keywords editing for site-wide passwords or private passwords[/thread], then I was thinking maybe I could write a quick hack that periodically appends comments to existing Keywords.

Since it's password-protected and I'll be telling everybody to just use Comments for user-submitted keywords, I think I'd be safe from spammers, etc.

But alas, no API for comments. Hrm, do mail notifications of comments include the photo ID and actual comment (I'm thinking procmail + php)?

Hackish. Please don't make me hack too badly.

--Darryl

devbobo · October 11, 2007

G'day Darryl,

It's something we may do for 1.2.1, retrieving comments should be pretty easy, but I will have to think through the issues around adding comments.

As for the comments email, it has a link to the SmugMug image, so you could retrieve the image id, but the comment isn't included.

Cheers,

David

darryl · October 11, 2007

Yah, I saw the link in a test comment I made. Good to hear you're thinking about adding it. I don't relish trying to screen scrape considering that comments are "hidden" in Javascript and I'll have to go through some gyrations to make Smugmug think that curl or LWP is a real web browser. :P

--Darryl

darryl · October 15, 2007

Once again, RSS to the rescue!

From here: http://smugmug.jot.com/WikiHome/Customization/FeedsTricks

http://[nickname].smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=usercomments&Data=[nickname]&AuthKey=hhXia.&format=rss200

The AuthKey isn't actually required.

One little nit: The comments tag doesn't actually take you to the "comments page" for the item. It seems like technically, this should be the same page as the photo itself, since SmugMug doesn't have separate comments pages for photos (unlike say, blog entries).

   <item>
     <title>Guest commented on G &amp; D's photo</title>
     <link>http://gladlee.smugmug.com/gallery/1865178/1/93737758/Medium#comment</link>
     <description>&lt;p&gt;Guest commented on G &amp; D's photo: &lt;a href=&quot;http://gladlee.smugmug.com/gallery/1865178/1/93737758/Medium#comment&quot; title=&quot;Guest commented on G &amp; D's photo&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://gladlee.smugmug.com/photos/93737758-S.jpg&quot; width=&quot;200&quot; height=&quot;300&quot; alt=&quot;Guest commented on G &amp; D's photo&quot; title=&quot;Guest commented on G &amp; D's photo&quot; style=&quot;border: 1px solid #000000;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rating: 0 stars&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Comment: Nice perspective. Your focus is, um, needle sharp.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
     <category>Travel</category>
     <comments>http://gladlee.smugmug.com/comment.mg?Type=Image&amp;TypeID=93737758</comments>
     <pubDate>Thu, 14 Sep 2006 14:47:18 -0700</pubDate>
     <author>feeds-nobody@smugmug.com (G &amp; D)</author>
     <guid isPermaLink="false">smugmug:comment:574384</guid>
     
    </item>

devbobo · October 15, 2007

Darryl,

you will see that the comments element is standard across all rss feeds, it's the url where someone can post a comment on the given image or album.

Cheers,

David

darryl · October 15, 2007

devbobo wrote:

Darryl,

you will see that the comments element is standard across all rss feeds, it's the url where someone can post a comment on the given image or album.

Cheers,

David

Hi David:

Right, but for the Comments feed, it points to a non-functioning URL.

--Darryl

darryl · October 15, 2007

lastBuildDate for usercomments RSS is not correct
Hi, hitting this feed:

http://gladlee.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=usercomments&Data=gladlee&format=rss200

I get:

<lastBuildDate>Mon, 15 Oct 2007 19:09:34 -0700</lastBuildDate>

(Timestamp of when I hit the feed.)

However the most recent comment is from:

<pubDate>Sun, 14 Oct 2007 22:46:55 -0700</pubDate>

Shouldn't lastBuildDate reflect the last time a comment was made, like how it works with the Recent Galleries feed?