With two simple steps you can let users hit your site’s search page without forcing them to visit first.

First, create an OpenSearch definition.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
                       xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Wynn Netherland</ShortName>
<Description>Designer &amp; Developer</Description>
<Contact>wynn@orrka.com</Contact>
<Image height="16" width="16" type="image/x-icon">http://wynnnetherland.com/favicon.ico</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="get" template="http://wynnnetherland.com/?s={searchTerms}"/>
<moz:SearchForm>http://wynnnetherland.com</moz:SearchForm>
</OpenSearchDescription>

Next, reference your search definition in your page layout.

<link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="http://wynnnetherland.com/opensearch.xml" title="Wynn Netherland" />

Here’s a quick video on how FireFox and Chrome handle OpenSearch and how your users will benefit:

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CSS Metaframeworks – King of all @media from Wynn Netherland on Vimeo.

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Introducing tail.thechangelog.com

Adam and I are always looking for ways to discover what’s fresh and new in open source so we built a little application that helps you drink from the GitHub firehose. Tail gives you a real-time view of all public GithHub events and lets you filter by event type and programming languages. It still has some rough spots but we’d love to get your feed back here or just send a tweet to @changelogshow.

Visit: http://tail.thechangelog.com

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A real world example

My LinkedIn gem depends on ROXML which in turn depends on Active Support, and more specifically Object#present?. If you don’t know present? is just the opposite of blank?. Never one to eschew the unless conditional (I know, I’m a heretic) I’ve always used unless foo.blank? and didn’t notice when present? was added.

So when asked to debug my gem in an older project the error message was puzzling: undefined method `present?' for "status":String

String in this case is just a red herring. How do I know that? (Pretend for a minute you don’t use present? all the time or that you’re a noob). A quick search on APIdock tells us that Active Support added this method in version 2.2.1.

I know this because the navigation is enabled for this method starting in 2.2.1. So, mystery solved. My friend can now monkey patch his way out of this one or upgrade to a later version of Active Support. Pick your poison.

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Be sure and grab 0.8.0: sudo gem install twitter

To use the gem with Tumblr, pass a new argument when using HTTPAuth. Also note your username is your email address on Tumblr:

httpauth = Twitter::HTTPAuth.new('email', 'password', :api_endpoint => 'tumblr.com')
base = Twitter::Base.new(httpauth)

pp base.user_timeline

Tumblr does not support all API methods and instead returns 404s. I’ll look into a way to catch those and raise NotImplemented instead.

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To do this, we call Version 2 of the GitHub API, which provides a great deal of info about GitHub users and repositories. To retrieve repo info, we call repos/show method:

http://github.com/api/v2/xml/repos/show/pengwynn/linkedin

The API supports JSON, YAML, and XML return types. From JavaScript, JSON is the simplest data format to work with. Simply replace the xml segment with json:

http://github.com/api/v2/json/repos/show/pengwynn/linkedin

Most likely, hitting this URL from your browser will download the file. Open that up in your favorite text editor and you should see a JavaScript Object Notation representation of the same repo info:

{
    "repository": {
        "url": "http://github.com/pengwynn/linkedin",
        "description": "Ruby wrapper for the LinkedIn API",
        "watchers": 43,
        "homepage": "http://bit.ly/ruby-linkedin",
        "fork": false,
        "forks": 1,
        "private": false,
        "name": "linkedin",
        "owner": "pengwynn",
        "open_issues": 1
    }
}

To put this info on the page, in our example, we’ll use jQuery, but you can of course use another framework or plain vanilla JavaScript.

jQuery(document).ready(function($){

  $.each($('.post.link.github h3 a'), function() {
    var post = $(this).parents(".post");
    var url = $(this).attr('href');
    var segments = url.split('/');
    var repo = segments.pop();
    var username = segments.pop();
    $.getJSON("http://github.com/api/v2/json/repos/show/"+username+"/"+repo+"?callback=?", function(data){
      var repo_data = data.repository;
      if(repo_data) {
        var watchers_link = $('<a>').addClass('watchers').attr('href', url+'/watchers').text(repo_data.watchers);
        var forks_link = $('<a>').addClass('forks').attr('href', url+'/network').text(repo_data.forks);
        var comment_link = post.find('.meta .comment-count');
        comment_link.after(watchers_link);
        comment_link.after(forks_link);
      }
    });
  });
});

This code looks for any entries that have CSS classes of link and github (which come from the post’s tags), and find the href for the link. We then lop off the last two URL segments to get the repo name and user to pass to our API call.

Note the callback=? which is required for the dynamic JSONP callback which jQuery wires up to our inline callback function. In this function, the data parameter is that JSON we looked at earlier. In this case we just create a couple of links that point back to GitHub and append them to the .meta div for the post.

Easy peasy!

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Download the free trial. Full version is only $15 + tax.

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When I needed a Backtweets widget for a client Rails application, I whipped up a quick plugin that provides an easy helper for writing all those JavaScript options.

Installation

You can install the plugin from the GitHub repo:

script/plugin install git://github.com/pengwynn/backtweets_helper.git

Displaying a tweet count in your view

To display a count of tweets that reference the current page, simply call the helper:

<%= backtweets_count %>
<%= backtweets_count(:size => :small) %>

The full set of options include:

Displaying recent comments, blogroll and search

The plugin also includes three other helpers to render user comments and blogroll widgets as well as a comment search widget:

<%= backtweets_comments('pengwynn') -%>
<%= backtweets_blogroll('pengwynn') -%>
<%= backtweets_search('ruby') -%>

If you would like to hit the Backtweets API for more info on your links and counts, check out the Twitterland gem.

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What’s exposed?

The LinkedIn API documentation could use some organization. To save you some digging, here are the main aspects of the REST API.

Profile

View public and full information for LinkedIn members based on the authenticated user, member ID, or public profile URL. Visibility of profile information depends on the distance the target user is to the authenticated user in his LinkedIn network.

Connections

Retrieve the authenticated user’s social graph

Status

Let everyone know what you’re up to, or see what they’re working on.

Search

Find LinkedIn public profiles based on several criteria.

Invitations

Invite users to connect on behalf of the authenticated user.

Getting started

Before you can use the API, you’ll need to set up your API keys.

Ruby gem installation

# Are you ready to Tummmmmmmmmmmmble?
sudo gem install gemcutter
gem tumble

sudo gem install linkedin

Usage

Start by authenticating via OAuth. To play around from irb, you’ll need to authenticate via the PIN method.

require 'rubygems'
require 'linkedin'

# get your api keys at https://www.linkedin.com/secure/developer
client = LinkedIn::Client.new('your_consumer_key', 'your_consumer_secret')
rtoken = client.request_token.token
rsecret = client.request_token.secret

# to test from your desktop, open the following url in your browser
# and record the pin it gives you
client.request_token.authorize_url
=> "https://api.linkedin.com/uas/oauth/authorize?oauth_token=<generated_token>"

# then fetch your access keys
client.authorize_from_request(rtoken, rsecret, pin)
=> ["OU812", "8675309"] # <= save these for future requests

# or authorize from previously fetched access keys
client.authorize_from_access("OU812", "8675309")

# you're now free to move about the cabin, call any API method

Be sure and save those access keys and just call authorize_from_access in subsequent irb sessions.

Grabbing a profile

Once authenticated via OAuth, you can grab the profile for the authenticated user simply by calling profile

# get the profile for the authenticated user
client.profile

You can also grab the profile for another user via the member id or public profile url:

# get a profile for someone found in network via ID
client.profile(:id => 'gNma67_AdI')

# get a profile for someone via their public profile url
client.profile(:url => 'http://www.linkedin.com/in/netherland')

If you want to see more than first-name,last-name, and headline, you’ll need to pass in a list of fields to return:

# get a profile for someone found in network via ID
client.profile(:id => 'gNma67_AdI', :fields => %w(first-name, last-name, headline, positions, education))

For the full list of possible fields, check the docs.

More examples

For examples using the other API methods, check out the examples folder in the source on GitHub.

Summary

I want to give a big hat tip to John Nunemaker for helping me implement OAuth in this gem and for inspiring me with his ultra-popular Twitter gem.

Once you navigate the documentation, I believe you’ll find the LinkedIn API to be a powerful platform to integrate into your Ruby applications. Install the gem and go build somethting cool.

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John Nunemaker. I’ve learned a ton just by looking through John’s code. He not only churns out great projects, he’s active in the discussion groups to answer questions and fix issues. I can’t wait to see some cool things from John in 2010.

Eric Davis. Let’s face it, issue management isn’t sexy, but Eric has done a fantastic job on the Redmine team to keep improving the open source issue tracker. He’s contributed a number of plugins and is always around in the forums to listen and help the n00bs. Need help deploying or maintaining Redmine in your shop? Hire Eric.

Mike Gunderloy. I can’t start my day without a double shot of Ruby links. Mike is also a community leader, working to grow the Rails tent and bring folks in.

Who are you thankful for?

Who in the Ruby community are you thankful for this year? Why not drop a comment here or send a tweet to let them know?

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