The Poor Man’s API
A lot of time and effort go into both developing and using API’s. Their strengths are documented throughout many products on the web. For me personally, Twitter and Flickr have been models of API’s that change the way I created applications. Looking at an API makes my imagination wander, my drive to tinker and create go wild.
However, API’s also require a certain level of aptitude. The user must understand the basics of programming, know what data to capture, what data to store, etc. In the end, an API may be used by millions but only understood by a small percentage of that. There is, however, an API that we all know how to use: email.
[Side note: my fiancee pointed out to me the other day that I usually spell it "e-mail" with the hyphen. That's the way it was originally spelled. She said I was showing my age!]
When we created our ftp functionality, we wanted to incorporate an easy method for publishers to be able to use the URL’s and embed statements in their websites without having to log back into Castfire. To accomplish this, after ftp’ing files to Castfire, two e-mails are sent:
- Acknowledge the files have been uploaded and provide back the URL’s and embed statement for the new episode. It also states that these files are not currently ready as they are being transcoded.
- A final e-mail stating that the transcoding has finished and it is available for publishing.
The email is also "smart" because the directory structure of the publisher’s ftp site mirrors the hierarchy of their account. So a network login sees directories for each content producer and channel, as well as directories for each media type (intro, outro, promo). Each content producer login sees a subset of the network. So a publisher can upload new episodes into the correct channel without having to log in to Castfire - including shows that have multiple content segments.
In addition, default settings, including filenames, metadata, and status can be set for each channel. This is a huge time savings for the publisher as you can set it once and rarely have to revisit it.
We view these e-mails emails as the most basic API possible! FTP and email have been around just about as long as the internet and are accessible to a great majority of web users. While it is possible to log in and publish shows through our CMS, it is many times faster and easier to ftp 10 new videos and get an email back when they are complete.