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Disqus is a very clever and simple way to add comments to just about any page. Thanks to the handy plugins for various blogging platforms (WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger and more) it's easy to integrate into your current publishing system.
For those of using a custom blogging engine there's even some nice JavaScript code that can get Disqus comments on your site in no time.
The only problem with using Disqus is there's no on-site backup -- all your comments are stored and managed through Disqus, but if Disqus is down for some reason, or you decide to stop using it in the future, well, you're screwed.
There's a nicely integrated plugin for WordPress that automatically pushes your Disqus comments to your WordPress database, but the those of us not using WordPress are seemingly out of luck.
Luckily for us the the company [http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Disqus_Poised_to_Rule_the_World_of_Blog_Comments recently launched] a new [http://disqus.com/docs/api/ public API], which offers some ways to retrieve your comment data and store it wherever you like. Grab a couple of joe and we'll dig into to how the Disqus API works.
== Getting Started ==
The Disqus API is slightly convoluted, but with a little work we can get what we're after. The first step is grabbing your [http://disqus.com/api/get_my_key/ Disqus API key] (note that you need to be logged into Disqus for that link to work).
Now, if you look over the documentation you'll notice that there's actually two API keys we need. The first is the one linked above, but then we'll also need a key for each "forum" that we're going to access. Luckily we can query for the second key.
If the word "forum" is a little confusing, here's low down (the terminology we suspect originates from Disqus' infancy when it was a forum software project).
Each of your sites in Disqus are what Disqus calls a "forum." Within each site or forum, you have message threads. The threads correspond to you blog posts (or the page where you embed Disqus).
Then within each thread are the "posts," or comments, people have left on your site.
So the API process means first you fetch a list of forums (if you only have one site, there's just one forum_id to worry about), then you fetch a list of "threads" in each forum, then you can request the actual comments for each thread.
== Dive in ==
To help get you started I've written a quick and dirty Disqus API Client for Python. Because the Disqus API is young and subject to change, I didn't mirror it, rather I created a generic wrapper function which can handle all the current (and future) methods.
Here's the code:
<pre>
import urllib
import simplejson
BASE_PATH = 'http://disqus.com/api/'
DEBUG = True
class DisqusError(Exception):
def __init__(self, code, message):
self.code, self.message = code, message
def __str__(self):
return 'DisqusError %s: %s' % (self.code, self.message)
class DisqusAPIClient():
def __init__(self):
"""instantiate"""
def __getattr__(self, method):
def method(_self=self, _method=method, **params):
url = "%s%s/?&%s" % (BASE_PATH, _method, urllib.urlencode(params))
if DEBUG: print url
data = self.fetch(url)
return data
return method
def fetch(self, url):
data = simplejson.load(urllib.urlopen(url))
if data.get("code", "") != "ok":
raise DisqusError(data["code"], data["message"])
return data['message']
def __repr__(self):
return "<DisqusClient: %s>" % self.method
</pre>
Save that in a new file, named disqus.py, somewhere on your PythonPath. Be sure to note that we're using the Python simplejson library, so you'll need to [http://pypi.python.org/pypi/simplejson download and install] that if you haven't already.
== Using the Disqus API ==
Okay, now we have something we can use to access Disqus and return nice, native Python objects. So do we go about using it?
Here's an example using the Python command line interface:
<pre>
>>> from disqus import DisqusAPIClient
>>> client = DisqusAPIClient()
>>> API_KEY = 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXX'
>>> fkey = client.get_forum_list(user_api_key=API_KEY)
>>> fkey
[{u'created_at': u'2008-08-29 18:33:26.560284', u'shortname': u'luxagraf', u'name': u'luxagraf', u'id': u'00000000'}]
</pre>
So the first thing we do is import our client. Then we define our API key. The next step is fetch our list of forums using the Disqus method <code>get_forum_list</code>, which requires a parameter <code>user_api_key</code> along with the actual key.
As you can see the result is a Python list containing, among other data, our forum id. So now we can plug that into the function that will retrieve our forum key.
Here's how that works:
<pre>
>>> forum_key = client.get_forum_api_key(user_api_key=API_KEY, forum_id=fkey[0]['id'])
>>> forum_key
u'u@E6KnR....'
</pre>
All we've done here is call the <code>get_forum_api_key</code> method, passing it the user API key and the forum id, which we extracted from our earlier call.
Now that we have the forum key we can actually retrieve a list of threads (all the posts where we have Disqus comments running).
Once we have the list of threads, we can then query of all the comments on each thread:
<pre>
>>> comments = []
>>> posts = client.get_thread_list(forum_api_key=forum_key)
>>> for post in posts:
... comments.append(client.get_thread_posts(forum_api_key=forum_key, thread_id=post['id']))
</pre>
What we've done here is create a list object to store all our comments and then queried for the list of threads. Once we have the thread we loop through each one and call <code>get_thread_posts</code> which returns the actual comments.
Then we just append those to our <code>comments</code> list.
Now we have all the comments that have been posted on each entry in a single Python list. From here all we need to do loop through the comments and store them in database that matches to all the kinds of data Disqus stores -- comment, commenter name, avatar and so on.
Because there are any number of ways you can do that, different databases etc, we'll leave that as an exercise for the reader, but to access the individual comments and associated data you would just need to loop through our comments list like so:
<pre>
>>> for c in comments:
... if c:
... print c[0]['message']... etc
</pre>
Rather than simply printing out the data, just call a function that writes the data to the database and you'll have your local backup of Disqus comments.
== Conclusion ==
When it comes to sending comments to Disqus, you'll have to stick with the JavaScript forms that the company provides. At least for now, though the API docs do note that Disqus is looking into other ways of submitting.
Still, despite being one-way, the Disqus API makes it relatively easy to store a local backup of all the comments that have been submitted to your site through the Disqus service.
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