The Medium RSS Feed’s Lacking Half | by Sabesan Sathananthan | Geek Tradition | Jun, 2022

retrieves the stats (clapCount, voterCount, responseCount, and readingTime) of Medium posts

On this article, I’ll clarify the way to retrieve the stats ( claps depend, voter depend, response depend, and studying time) of Medium feed posts utilizing a REST API, the shortage of this function within the Medium RSS feed is what motivated me to create this superior Medium API. That is my forty first Medium article.

I needed to acquire the stats ( claps depend, voter depend, response depend, and studying time) of my Medium posts whereas engaged on my private web site growth. 2 years earlier than after I implement the medium widget to my web site I discovered Pixelpoint.io which generated a widget with clap counts of a medium submit. At that second I puzzled how they carried out it? Then I overlook to analysis it however final month I discovered that pixelpoint.io’s widget will not be working. I seemed in every single place for an answer to my wants however couldn’t discover one, so I had no alternative however to code it myself.

My preliminary instinct was to take a look at the RSS feed however there have been no such particulars are supplied then I seemed on the official documentation of the general public REST API by Medium, and nothing was there both. The Medium REST API solely lets you create a Medium article by HTTP POST methodology(cf part 3.3). You may’t retrieve or edit a Medium article through the use of the Medium API ????.

So as to get an understanding of how the helpful stats are retrieved within the Medium submit, I began to examine the Medium utilizing browser developer instruments. Shockingly, there was no request to acquire the stats amongst all of the XHR calls, which push me to take a look at the HTML response of the Medium submit.

curl https://medium.com/p/unique_Id_of_the_post >> submit.html

As a javascript variable, the claps depend, voter depend, response depend, and studying time are straight injected into the HTML response. You may confirm that by typing console.log(window.__APOLLO_STATE__); within the Javascript console of the Put up web page.

Then I scrape these helpful stats utilizing request and cheerio .

In a medium submit, knowledge comes as JSON in a script tag. Through the use of javascript, these knowledge are picked up and rendered in DOM on the browser-side. Normally, knowledge in a script tag takes this manner:

You may ready to make use of the Superior Medium API that I developed as follows:

There are 5 kinds of requests. you would be capable of get all of the responses through the use of HTTP GETmethodology.

Medium feed in JSON

You may in a position to get the RSS feed of the final 10 Medium posts through the use of the next hyperlinks (change your username as an alternative of @username ).

medium.com/feed/@username 
or 
username.medium.com/feed

The next request of the API provides the direct JSON conversion of that RSS Feed.

curl https://advanced-medium-api.herokuapp.com/medium/consumer/{userId}

Medium Superior Knowledge

You may in a position to get the Medium feed in JSON with the lacking a part of the Medium feed reminiscent of clapCount, voterCount, responseCount, readingTime. every lacking knowledge injected in each submit(gadgets) object.

The next request of the API provides the JSON conversion of the RSS feed with the injection of lacking knowledge.

curl https://advanced-medium-api.herokuapp.com/superior/consumer/{userId}

Medium Custom-made Knowledge

JSON conversion of the Medium RSS feed is custom-made in accordance with the classes. Order the Medium submit’s tags in accordance with their use depend among the many newest 10 posts and the tagOrder return that tags’ order rank. Medium’s newest 10 posts have been divided by 3 and each 3 posts have been pushed in an array and people arrays have been pushed in a single array. There’s an algorithm that returns essentially the most appropriate tag for the Medium submit among the many different tags of that Medium submit.

The next request of the API provides the custom-made model of the Medium feed in JSON

curl https://advanced-medium-api.herokuapp.com/custom-made/consumer/{userId}

Medium Custom-made Superior Knowledge

This response accommodates the Medium custom-made knowledge with the injection of lacking stats reminiscent of clapCount, voterCount, responseCount, readingTime.

The next request of the API provides the custom-made model of the Medium feed in JSON with the lacking a part of the Medium feed.

curl https://advanced-medium-api.herokuapp.com/superior/custom-made/consumer/{userId}

Lacking knowledge of a specific submit.

This response accommodates solely the lacking half (clapCount, voterCount, responseCount, readingTime) of Medium feed for a specific Medium submit.

Request ???? ➡ ???? :

curl https://advanced-medium-api.herokuapp.com/medium/submit/{postId}

Response ????➡???? :

{
"clapCount": 98,
"responseCount": 4,
"voterCount": 12,
"readingTime": 4
}

This API is Open Supply and I welcome your contributions. final 2 years I used the medium widget from Pixelpoint.io which generated a widget with clap counts of a medium submit. I didn’t do analysis to get the lacking a part of the Medium feed after I used Pixelpoint.io. however 2 months earlier than Pixelpoint.io will not be working and this incident impacts my private web site. Due to this fact I pushed myself and created this API.