10/29/08 9:29AM

The FriendFeed API has a Python client library, so I thought I'd try it out with App Engine. It took a few tweaks to friendfeed.py, but it was pretty easy to get everything working.

First, I had to change the import line for simplejson:

#import simplejson
from django.utils import simplejson

Second, I needed to switch to using App Engine's URL Fetch API for the HTTP requests:

from google.appengine.api import urlfetch

This required a few adjustments to the FriendFeed class' _fetch() method. I moved the auth check to the top because it flowed a bit better and changed one line in that clause:

headers = {}
if self.auth_nickname and self.auth_key:
  pair = "%s:%s" % (self.auth_nickname, self.auth_key)
  token = base64.b64encode(pair)
  #request.add_header("Authorization", "Basic %s" % token)
  headers['Authorization'] = 'Basic %s' % token

Then I changed the post_args lines:

if post_args is not None:
  #request = urllib2.Request(url, urllib.urlencode(post_args))
  result = urlfetch.fetch(url, urllib.urlencode(post_args),
                          urlfetch.POST, headers)
  #request = urllib2.Request(url)
  result = urlfetch.fetch(url, headers=headers)

And then one last change to fetch the data:

#stream = urllib2.urlopen(request)
#data = stream.read()
data = result.content
return parse_json(data)

With those changes in place, everything seems to work fine. I haven't done any real testing, but it worked for reading public and private feeds, as well as posting a new entry.

I used the API to pull in FriendFeed likes and comments for each blog post. I did this by searching for the post's title and getting back the ID if the post URLs match:

service = friendfeed.FriendFeed()
feed = service.search('who:tom service:blog %s' % title)
for entry in feed['entries']:
  if entry['link'] == 'http://www.tomstocky.com/blog/%s' % slug:
    ffid = entry['id']

With that ID, I can then pull in the likes and comments for the post:

feed = service._fetch_feed('/api/feed/entry/' + ffid)
entry = feed['entries'][0]
likes = entry['likes']
comments = entry['comments']

When those are passed to my template, the end result is what now appear below each post on the homepage:
screenshot of FriendFeed info