NewsCloud Web Services
Introduction
NewsCloud has an open Application Programming Interface (API for short). This means that anyone can write their own program to present NewsCloud data (like stories, tags, members or groups) in new and different ways. There's a long list of API methods available to you to work with, so have at it!
To make using our Web services super easy, we've built a PHP class for you to use. Any PHP programmer can make simple function calls to this class to access our API. The data from our site is returned in easy to access arrays. The class requires PHP version 4.x or higher. If you don't want to use PHP, you can access the APIs via REST by following the documentation. If you'd like to write wrappers of our APIs in other languages, please email us.
Getting Started
To get started, follow the easy directions below:
- Check out our working examples below
- Read our API Documentation
- Sign in or register to get an API key.
- Visit our downloads page to get our user friendly PHP component, the source code to our examples and the PEAR HTTP Request library. Our source code is licensed under GPL and is also available at SourceForge.
If you just want to work with headlines from our site, consider using our RSS feeds. You can use our feeds right on your site with the javascript we supply or integrate them into your Website with a parser like Magpie.
API Categories
Working Examples
These are examples of just a few things you can do with our Web services. You can download the code to any of these and completely customize the look, feel and behaviour of all of these examples. The design of these examples are just rough cuts - much more is possible. Please remember to attribute NewsCloud.com on any page you build with our APIs. Click here for the download page.
The Cloud Report - custom front page mockup Text-based mobile version of NewsCloud |
Stay Up To Date
Please subscribe to the 
the NewsCloud blog for updates to our API. If you use our apiNewsCloud PHP class, your code will be more insulated from internal changes, but NewsCloud APIs may change at any time.
Usage Limits
Because we're a small startup, we monitor API usage tightly and limit usage to prevent abuse. Once you've tried out our Web services, just let us know if you want us to increase your limits for your application. If you have a valid use, we'll do our best to accomodate you. Email us here.
Feedback & Support
Please visit the NewsCloud Forum if you would like to see changes or improvements in our API features. Please also let us know if you build any great applications that we should link to. If you would prefer, you can email us instead.
Disclaimer
NewsCloud Web services are experimental and are currently offered to outside developers on an ad hoc basis with no guarantee of uptime or availability of continued service. We reserve the right to disable access to external applications at any time. As a small start up, we are currently evaluating the issues and results that arise from making these services available and creating policies for our full public release.
