BlipPy - a Python Library for Blip.pl
The latest version: 0.1.3
Overview
BlipPy is a Python library that helps communicate with polish community site called blip.pl. The library uses blip.pl API version 0.02 as a communication protocol and thus is limited to the features provided by this API. For more information see the official blip.pl API documentation.
As of version 0.1 of BlipPy the library provides only access to the low-level API. There is a plan for version 0.2 to implement something like "blip session" management which might be useful for implementing a standalone client of blip.
Download
At the moment the library can be obtained from the subversion repository. Invoke the following command to get the sources:
svn co https://blippy.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/blippy blippy
This will create a directory called blippy with the fresh sources from the repository. The only file you actually need is blippy.py.
Usage
Usage of BlipPy is pretty straightforward. The following subsections describe initialization and show a few examples of how to use BlipPy library.
Initialization
The only thing you have to do to initialize library is creating a Communicator object. The following example shows that:
import blippy
comm = blippy.Communicator("username", "password", "optional-user-agent-string")
After creating Communicator object you have a full access to all the features provided by the library via this object. Remember however, that providing a valid username and password is needed for getting access to all functionalities provided by the blip server. Only a part of blip.pl API calls allows unauthenticated access to the server resources.
Getting information about bliposphere
Bliposphere is a global dashboard visible to all users of blip.pl. It contains recent statuses set by blip users. To get information about bliposphere you have to do the following:
bliposphere = comm.GetBliposphere(20)
Almost all Communicator methods return list of dictionary objects. In this case GetBliposphere returns an array of 20 dict objects. Every dict contains information about one status for particular user. This is the example of such an information:
{
'body': u'Ha, nowiutki statusik :)',
'user_path': '\\/users\\/bayger',
'created_at': '2008-03-29 12:00:00',
'type': 'Status',
'id': 123456789,
'transport': {'name': 'sms', 'id': 2}
}
For more information about format of returned data see the official blip.pl API documentation.