Difference between revisions of "YTMND:API:Basic Overview"

Revision as of 01:34, October 13, 2007

YTMND Developer API: Basic Overview

This documentation is partially plagiarized from the Digg API documentation, as the YTMND API was modeled after it.

Requests

• See Response Formats for details on specifying the desired format you would like returned
• All requests should include a User-Agent HTTP Header and an HTTP Referrer.

• This is optional purely for our own statistics.

• Requests made from Javascript running on your web pages should be proxied to avoid same-origin policy conflicts.

Responses

• All responses are UTF-8 encoded, the default response format is XML.
• Times are expressed in Unix epoch timestamp format.

• All Times are converted to the GMT timezone before being returned.

This may be problematic as YTMND uses CST for all of its timestamps as its servers are located in the CST timezone.

It is possible that in the future an option may be added to allow timestamps to be returned in CST.

• The YTMND API and Digg API differ in that the YTMND API will always return a container, even if your request returns no results.
• HTTP response codes should always be 200 (OK) or 304 (Not Modified) if the response is cached.

• You may receive a response code of 403 (Forbidden) in a case that we feel you are hitting our server too rapidly.
• More information can be found in the Error and Response Codes article.

Data Limitations

In its initial form, the YTMND API offers no form of pagination or custom limiting of its data response. Each interface has its own specific rules, but in most cases your requests will not return gigantic amounts of data. Various methods should be expected to return more data than others, but such information is listed on each interface's documentation page.

Caching

In rare cases when a piece of information is continually requested it may be cached in memory (server-side) for a short period of time to ensure requests don't overload the server. In most cases data is not cached at all. This means that it is up to you to cache when necessary. Setting up a proxy cache isn't too hard, so please cache your results if you plan on using the API on a high traffic site. We monitor connections to the API and you may get throttled or banned if you request too much data too rapidly. Currently this issue is unimportant, but eventually limitations may be created.