On this special day - the updated Yandex.Subscription API

As many know, we have an excellent web service for reading RSS / Atom feeds - Yandex.Following . However, it had one small flaw - for more than three years the external API of the service was in beta state and practically did not develop, while there was no intelligible documentation for it. Because of this, writing your own application on its basis was problematic. But the situation has moved off dead center: the updated Subscription API can officially be considered open, and its documentation has become available on the Yandex.API page.

We decided to make life as easy as possible for developers who want to write their own applications that interact with Yandex.Following, or integrate our service into their RSS reader.

And here are the functions that were implemented for this in the API.

• Supports data exchange in JSON format , more suitable for processing on the client side. If for any reason you were uncomfortable using XML, you now have a choice.
• Full REST API support and user authorization via OAuth 2.0 protocol.
• Search with filtration and weight model. Starting today, all new posts that fall into the user's feed will be indexed. Search them now can be carried out directly through the API. Unfortunately, posts that have fallen into user feeds before July 1 have not yet been indexed, but we will soon correct this shortcoming.
• Request of tapes or history of user actions with indication of the period for which data is requested. This is useful when writing applications that use client-side caching.
• Hiding posts in the tapes on a certain basis.
• Batch add threads.
• Arbitrary reordering of folders and reverse sorting of unread messages.
• Request the number of unread posts for tape or stream.

One of the employees of Yandex has already written a test application for Android on the basis of the new API. It is far from perfect, but you can make an impression about the capabilities of the new API.
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The Yandex.Following service itself also does not stand still. Thanks to clustering, we have significantly improved the update time for subscription feeds. Previously, it was updated every few hours, but now it takes 5 to 15 minutes between the appearance of a blog post that a user has subscribed to and displaying it in a feed.

In addition, we have good news for those who are accustomed to the interface Yandex. Lenta. Especially for them, we have created a new lightweight interface for reading Subscriptions.