XML-RPC Interface (Idle Words)

05.13.2003

XML-RPC Interface

Inspired by the web services madness at BlogShares and Technorati, I've whipped up a quick XML-RPC interface to our own NITLE crawl database. You can get the language, authoring tool, and number of incoming and outgoing blog links for any blog URL we have listed (110K blogs and daily growin'). The micro-documentation is available right here, or you can grab the source code for a tiny Perl demo client. No keys or other such nonsense - just don't melt our server.

For the curious, I've also slapped together a description of our methodology, such as it is, explaining how we run the crawl. It's something that I hope to flesh out as time goes by - let me know what I left out, or send in suggestions for a better way to do it.

I think we're going to call this project the 'NITLE Blog Census', by the way. That makes it sound nice and official.