Data and Metadata

A bit late today, but here it is. There are some neat things in the Google Reader API that have been exposed as REST-like services. Here are some examples (they will require you to be logged in to Google Reader in order to work):

Read Entry in Google Reader Window
Followed a Link in the Entry Body
Followed a Link in the Entry Header
Keep Unread
Read, Marked Unread (I refer to these as my “re-read” posts – I read them, and then decided they needed more thought)
Starred

And some documentation on the API itself.

Google recently submitted to the W3C a paper suggesting a very interesting, multi-request compression scheme, which boils down to:

In this proposal, a dictionary is a file downloaded by the user agent from the server that contains strings which are likely to appear in subsequent HTTP responses. In the case described above, if the header, footer, JavaScript and CSS are stored in a dictionary possessed by both user agent and server, the server can substitute these elements with references to the dictionary, and the user agent can reconstruct the original page from these references. By substituting dictionary references for repeated elements in HTTP responses, the payload size can be reduced.

While not wholly new, this is a very good idea, one that I’ve been waiting for smarter minds than myself to codify for some time.