This it seems is no longer relevant. I have marked it deprecated. The ello URL syntax described i.e.  http://ello.co/username.json no longer works. They weren’t very helpful to the project when I first looked at it. This post morphed into a generic web login via scripts page. I will consider splitting it and making the ello stuff private (or even deleting it.) 

I was planning to incorporate my ello feed into a planet aggregator and when written in 2015 ello exported a feed as JSON, here’s its name structure http://ello.co/username.json but you need to be logged in, god knows why; if not the file returns a version of the profile data.

This post thus deals mainly with how to automate ello’s login, the problem of converting the JSON to XML is dealt with on a post of the same name. This post morphed into a generic web login via scripts.

Here are some previous attempts to reverse engineer the api,

  1. https://github.com/grant/ello
  2. http://www.programmableweb.com/api/unofficial-ello
  3. https://gist.github.com/conatus/cc665f917d5558c123bc

The third URL discusses using the unofficial API to perform this but documents the fact that the ello team oppose it and have recently introduced a xscripting defence which makes it much harder to use a previously issued cookie. The authentication hack is not well documented. At the moment the authentication is session and cookie based which is why my experiments my experiments with wget and curl have failed. i.e. they both bring down the profile not the feed.

I should bear in mind that they are promising RSS so I don’t want to invest too much time. (Perhaps I should invest in the other part of the problem, converting JSON to XML.)

Do I miss second brain?

Dave Technology , , , ,

3 Replies

  1. Today I marked this page deprecated, the ello stuff is out of date and obsolete. I moved web scripting stuff to another page.

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