Spore.com has a number of feeds for you to use: We want to make sure you know about them.

Feeds are special data formats that allow subscribers to see the latest updates to a site. You can add any of these feeds to your favorite news reader (Google Reader, Bloglines, and NetNewsWire, for instance), but there are a wide range of tools that let you manipulate feeds into new, interesting forms. Yahoo! Pipes is one example of a tool that lets you turn feeds into "mashups" that incorporate data and programming logic, but there are many others.

We've included some more examples of ways to use our feeds in our Mac OS X Gift Pack, and we look forward to seeing what our creative community does with this data. (Note to those who want to dig deeper: The feeds are in Atom format, but most tools can handle Atom and RSS with equal ease.)

Here are some of the feeds we've made available

User's creations - The 20 most recently updated creations from one user. You can get to these via the orange feed icon in any user's profile page, or you can type it in directly: http://www.spore.com/atom/buddy/SCREENNAME/assets Replace SCREENNAME with the user's spore.com screen name, remembering to keep the case the same. For instance, MaxisCactus's feed lives at http://www.spore.com/atom/buddy/MaxisCactus/assets

Featured Creations - The 4 most recent Featured Creations. Just point your reader at http://www.spore.com/featuredFeed

Sporecasts - Any sporecast is available as a feed with the URL http://www.spore.com/atom/sporecast/SPORECASTID , where SPORECASTID is the numerical ID of the sporecast. You can figure out a sporecast's ID by clicking on its "small card" to view its "large card" in the website's Sporepedia. The url in your browser window contains the sporecast ID. For instance, the url for my "Opera Houses of Spore" looks like this: http://www.spore.com/sporepedia#qry=ssc-500032300629 The sporecast ID is 500032300629.

If you see a creature you like, is there a way to just add that creature to your game without adding the creator's entire portfolio?

Also, I notice you can't search the net for a creature in game (it just says spore servers are down). Is there any way around this? e.g. is there any way to log on to the online section of sporepedia from inside the game, type in "storm trooper" and get a list of all the creatures people have made that match it?

Also while we're at it, is there any way to search by most popular or rate creations from inside the game?

Glad to see a summary of the feeds. I can't find them anywhere!

Will it be too difficult to add a Newest Creation feed?

Will gadgets be introduced (similar in function to the Photo Gadget) for Google Desktop and other similar desktop programs?

primadog wrote:

Will gadgets be introduced (similar in function to the Photo Gadget) for Google Desktop and other similar desktop programs?

Gadgets and Twitter support for the win!

Actually, we hope that by exposing the feeds, we'll give other people the opportunity to put together Gadgets and the like, since you all probably have your favorite widget universes, and we can't necessarily hit them all.

maxispuzzle wrote:Actually, we hope that by exposing the feeds, we'll give other people the opportunity to put together Gadgets and the like, since you all probably have your favorite widget universes, and we can't necessarily hit them all.

Sounds pretty sweet to me.

This is the sort of information (this and the top post) I like to see .

Plus I'm a sucker for feeds.

MaxisPuzzle wrote:
Here are some of the feeds we've made available

User's creations ...
Featured Creations ...
Sporecasts ...

Are there others we can use? I love the Sporecast feed but wish there was a feed that include ALL the users creations. Also what about a feeds for user achievements and user events? Aslo one the can get favorites. Any feeds for a specific creature with comments?

Thanks! I'm definitely going to be using this to build some apps.

Ascus wrote:

MaxisPuzzle wrote:
Here are some of the feeds we've made available

User's creations ...
Featured Creations ...
Sporecasts ...

Are there others we can use? I love the Sporecast feed but wish there was a feed that include ALL the users creations. Also what about a feeds for user achievements and user events? Aslo one the can get favorites. Any feeds for a specific creature with comments?

Those feeds aren't available at this time, but I appreciate that they'd be neat to have. I'll put them in for future ideas, and we'll let you know when they show up.

mflux wrote:Thanks! I'm definitely going to be using this to build some apps.

Great! Let us know what you come up with.

Uhm, how about a development news feed? Oh wait, we're not allowed to hear about what's going to be happening with the game we spent $50 on.

Perhaps you could suggest this?

I made a basic javascript/php newsreader for quickly viewing sporecasts and the last 20 creations of a creator. It you get a chance check it out at http://ciper.com/spore/spore.php.

Let me know that you think?

I still have some cleanup, like backgrounds and sorting abilites, but its only place I know of that you can see a entire sporecast on one page. If you have a Mac, I would love to know if it works ok, I have tested that it works properly on windows with IE, FF, Opera, Safari and Chrome.

I am also looking for Empire Class Sporecast (sets of buildings and vehicles, that all work together), to add to the drop down list.

Nice tips! Tagged.


Is it difficult to use this feature to create a window that shows a random creature on the page? I'm new to web design.....

Wakeman wrote:Nice tips! Tagged.


Is it difficult to use this feature to create a window that shows a random creature on the page? I'm new to web design.....

The only real problem I ran into with my pagewas that non-IE browsers would not allow me to read the feeds since they were a different domain than my page, so I had to echo the rss feed through my site with php. otherwise, it fairly straight-forward XML and XHTML handling (with the typical user cross-browser issues that make you pull your hair out).

All the heavy lifting and processing of the feeds is done in javascript so feel free to take a look at the linked javascript file and css stylesheet. the index.php just echos the feed through my domain, and the only php in spore.php is to pull an external buddylist and sporecast list for the dropdowns. if there is any interest I will be happy to make a downloadable zip file containing all the source for the page so it could be implemented on any php capable host.

Neat!

Yeah, the XHTMLHttpRequest object (the magic behind Ajax, for those who don't know) is usually pretty wary about letting you do stuff on a different host. For good reason, but it can get frustrating. When I did an Ajax-y thing for my personal site (not about Spore), I had to solve that problem the same way you did: A simple piece of server-side PHP that would fetch the feed and just make it available to my page. So even though the feed originally came from elsewhere, my JavaScript code perceived it as coming from the same server.

Did you key in your buddies yourself? Or are you scraping your profile page for them? I've been thinking we should add a "get my buddies" feed or even just an XML doc, but we haven't had time to put it in yet. What else would make your ideas easier to put in place? (Obviously we can't promise anything, but knowing how people are actually using these will make it easier to prioritize features.)