"Missing" API methods

[Stephen Darlington]

Hi all,

I just started looking at the Pinboard API and I was wondering if the
following methods were likely to be implemented at any point:

posts/all?hashes
posts/get (the "hashes" and "meta" arguments)

These are important when you're trying to synchronise with Pinboard
especially on a device with limited memory and bandwidth. The
technical changes for my iPhone application (Yummy) to support
Pinboard would be fairly small but the difficulty in spotting changes
would limit the number of bookmarks that could be stored in practice.

Regards,
--> Stephen

[maciej]

I think the way change detection was implemented in the delicious API
is not very good, so I have not added support for del-style 'hashes'
and 'meta' arguments. I do understand the underlying problem, and
agree there should be something in the API to support it.

Could you describe the kind of behavior you want to support in your
app? I am assuming there would be some kind of initial sync of all
bookmarks, and then you would periodically check to see if there had
been changes or additions?

My preference would be to let clients query by identifier and get back
a timestamp of the most recent change to that bookmark, as well as
query by timestamp and get a list of all bookmark identifiers that had
changed since that time. Would that be useful?

[Stephen Darlington]

Thanks for your super-fast response.

I agree that the Delicious API isn't optimal (to say the least) and, other than having some working code against it, have no special attachment to it!

Yes, you just described my use case: get a copy of all bookmarks and keep my local copy up to date. The list of changes would also include deletions, something that is not handled well in the Delicious API.

Your "what's changed since timestamp" sounds like exactly what I'm looking for. The only addition I would make to that is: I don't want to have to download every relevant bookmark in one API call. With an unknown but relatively small amount of available memory it makes things a lot easier if I can request smaller batches.

Regards,
--> Stephen

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Stephen Darlington (www.zx81.org.uk)
"I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything that I thought it could be."
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