Sure, we’ve got new documentation for our API. But hacking your Box account for productivity purposes can be much simpler and faster, rendering API usage unnecessary.

Here’s a simple hack to get a customized Box feed fed into your Twitter account using your Box RSS feed
There are a myriad of RSS-mixing and filtering tools, but the best of the bunch is most likely Yahoo! Pipes, because it offers a range of simple to advanced utilities that make RSS remixing a snap.

For this 5 minute hack, you’ll need the RSS feed of the shared folder you’d like to monitor. There’s two ways to get an RSS feed.

1. Grab and Customize Your Feed

A. Easy - Box.net GUI

Did you know that RSS feeds are available for you through the Box.net user interface?

Click on the options tab for a folder, and select “Get Link” or “Get Public Link”.

You should see an RSS option, as in the picture above. Copy the link and paste it into the Fetch Feed module in Pipes.

B. Advanced - Use the API

This method is more difficult, but allows you to create customized feeds for other Box users, programatically. (This means you could open up a 3rd-party application to turn this 5-minute hack into a 5-second hack!)

Use the Get Account Tree method. For a folder with a shared RSS feed, you’ll get a link like this:

http://www.box.net/shared/cje09cp3qo

Add the string ‘rss.xml’ to the end so the link becomes http://www.box.net/shared/cje09cp3qo/rss.xml.

You can then supply the RSS feed as a URL Input in the HTTP address of your pipe. If the URL Input is connected to a Fetch Feed module, the pipe should automate the rest on its own. You can retrieve the results of your pipe almost instantly (it often takes a couple of seconds) by using the following address:

• http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?urlinput=%3Cfeed_url%3E&id=%3Cpipe_id%3E&_render=rss

Whether you’re using the GUI or the API to get your feed into Yahoo! Pipes, there are many different filters and operators you can perform to get your feed the way you like it. Many of these are simple, but can be surprisingly useful.

For instance, in the example at the top of the post, I used the String Builder and Regex modules to add James’s Facebook Files to the title of each item. See the Pipes documentation for more ideas.

2. Send Your Box Feed to Twitter

Using Twitterfeed makes this a one-minute, zero maintainence affair. Simply navigate to www.twitterfeed.com, follow the instructions, and either insert your provided Box RSS feed or your customized Yahoo Pipe feed.

Presto chango!

The TinyURL will now link to your document, giving easy access to your Twitter friends and co-workers.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more ways you can use simple hacks to improve your document productivity. If you have any home-brewed RSS hacks for your files and docs, tell us in the comments.

Whew. We’ve been putting the finishing touches on the new Enabled documentation.

You’ll see that it’s a wiki, on the Hayes build of Mindtouch’s Deki Wiki software. Expect to see some editing ability added in soon, as well as some of the neat abilities supported (bi-directional API support!).

In addition to much more simple API Reference, and a walkthrough for getting started with the API, you’ll also notice that we’re offering to promote developers who use the Box.net API in their apps.

This promotion works two ways:

1. Shared Files - whenever a user of your application shares a file through e-mail, we’ll include the name of your application and a link to your website in the text of the e-mail.

2. Your API - if you allow your application’s users to safely save and simply share with the Box.net API, we’ll work with you to get your API working directly with our user interface, so that launching your application to edit a file or document can be a one-click affair for users.

In a world of open platforms and open data, it makes the most sense for us to work together with developers to promote useful services. In the end, the user benefits most of all, with easy access to best-of-breed saving, sharing, and collaboration tools.

FireUploader

by

Rjonna 

What: An application to make Box.net accessible directly from your browser.

Why: Because it’s fast. Besides, who doesn’t want to turn Firefox into their OS?

How: Javascript and the Box.net API.

Fireuploader is intuitive and has a well-designed UI. But that’s only so helpful to a developer who wants to improve their project, so here are some ideas for future developments:

1. Syncing support. I often find that lots of my “house cleaning” activities take place while I’m offline. Taking care of uploading and backing up important files can’t happen if I don’t have a web connection, but by using a new offline/online framework such as Google Gears or another kind of local SQLite implementation, perhaps Fireuploader could be a killer app for offline as well as online use.

2. Parallel Publishing. Fireuploader has seperate interfaces for Flickr and Box. At first, this seems to make sense. Why would I want to store photos in more than one location?

When a photo is really important to me, and I have a service like Box that can act as a safe deposit space, maybe a more appropriate question is Why Not?

There’s a hilarious video that the Onion published last week.

While this scenario is far-fetched, what isn’t so far-fetched is the idea that you may want to do something with important files that the web service you originally published to won’t allow you to do.

By sending your file in parallel to Box.net, you have an insurance policy against such scenarios.

Because FireUploader eventually intends to interface with many different web services, I could imagine it being very useful for users to have the ability to easily publish files to Box.net as well as other applications 

I’d like to thank Rjonna again for using Box.net in his app. While most Box.net API apps are either server-side or add onto desktop apps, it’s great seeing your extension bridging the two together with admirable ease-of-use. 

We’ll keep an eye out for more of Rjonna’s projects.

-James

What’s big and blue and growing all the time?
If you guessed Box.net’s developer source code widget, you are correct!

PHP5 Library and Example App

First up on today’s menu is a library and example application for PHP5.

We took a medium-size Box.net integrated web app of over 600 lines, and reduced it to under 100 very prose-like lines of useful code.

It’s open source, so if you’d like to make a change (or you have questions) e-mail James at Box.net.

Python (Conduit Project Source Code!)

We hear Python is pretty delicious, especially with some framework on the side.

Unfortunately, there are no seasoned Python chefs on the Box team.

But our open-source developer community is showing us some love in the form of a Python binder class.

The Python code is from John Stowers at the Conduit Project.

Conduit is a total synchronization solution for GNOME desktops on *nix systems.

By storing your files in a Box account, Conduit lets you backup photos, files, and e-mails, transfer between computers, or even transfer from computer to mobile devices.

A new version of Conduit was released this week, so if you’re running *nix on your Box, check it out at conduit-project.org.

Conduit is open-source and has its own API which in turn interfaces with the Box API.

We think that’s a neat idea. In fact, if you can think of a good API for Box to interface with, e-mail James at Box and let it out.

If you’re not already subscribed to the blog, now would be a good time to do so. We’ll keep the tasty morsels coming.

Bon Appetit!

James

The call create_folder is supposed to take the parameters api_key, auth_token, parent_id, name and share. Unfortunately the ’share’ parameter was not read by our server (so sharing of the newly created folder was never done), and no error message was returned if the parameter was missing.

We are going to require the ’share’ parameter in three days, which may break your API calls if you don’t include it in the request. As a result, you may need to modify your code before then to avoid problems.

Keep in mind that the documentation required the share parameter, but the call did not. So if you followed the documentation, your code is fine, but if you found that share had no effect and you left it off, you’ll need to add it back in.

We are also going to try to directly contact developers who are making calls without the share parameter over the next three days to notify them of the change.

Thanks for your patience, guys. We are very sorry for the inconvenience.

Hello everyone! We’ve started up this blog for two reasons. First, so we can have a central place for announcements regarding the API. So everything from new features to backwards-incompatible changes will be announced here. Second, so we can gather feedback on the API. We want to hear all your thoughts, suggestions, criticisms and concerns. After all, the API exists for YOU guys, the developers, so we plan on doing everything in our power to cater to your needs.

We look forward to working with all of you. Here’s to a long, fruitful partnership!