For the serious players in the automotive industry on the net there is a new way to improve their sites. We had this feed for a while, but now with the new improvements and after big players (e.g. yahoo autos) have been happy with it, we wanted to share it with others around the world.
For developers that are not used to work with XML, XPath and other goodies, here is a short sample of code that will show you how easy it is to fetch our full feed. Unlike the previous post about our regular RSS feed, I’ve used here some basic functionality that anyone that used php (5.2+) will have under their belt.

<?php
/**
* @author Ido Green
*
* @since 04/10/2010
*
* @abstract Simple example how to fetch High Gear Media Full API using xPath
*
* @see greenido.wordpress.com
*
* @copyright HighGearMedia INC. 2010
*
*/error_reporting(E_ALL); // Always good to have it in development mode
$feed = new DOMDocument();
$feed->load('http://www.thecarconnection.com/api?uid=YourApiUserKey&cat=bottom-line');
if (isset($feed->documentElement)) {
$xpath = new DOMXPath($feed);
// Lets register TheCarConnection namespace
$xpath->registerNamespace('tcc', 'http://www.thecarconnection.com/rss');
// Now we looping on all the items and for each one we are extracting some data
foreach ($xpath->evaluate('//item') as $entryNode) {
// Simple way to get the title,desc per item
echo "Title: " . $xpath->evaluate('string(title)', $entryNode), "\n";
echo "Description " . $xpath->evaluate('string(description)', $entryNode), "\n";
// and some more interesting capabilities of xPath - we fetching the spec that is under tcc namespace for car details
echo "Make: " . $xpath->evaluate('string(tcc:review[1]/tcc:cardetails[1]/tcc:make[1])', $entryNode), "\n";
echo "Model: " . $xpath->evaluate('string(tcc:review[1]/tcc:cardetails[1]/tcc:make[1])', $entryNode), "\n";
echo "Rating: " . $xpath->evaluate('string(tcc:review[1]/tcc:cardetails[1]/tcc:rating[1])', $entryNode), " Out of 10\n";
echo "============\n";
}
} else {
echo 'Error: Could not fetch the feed';
}


You can also clone this code from github using: git clone git://gist.github.com/865542.git gist-865542

So it’s easy, right? You can load these feed for each site from our network.
For example: http://www.motorauthority.com/api?uid=YourUserKey&cat=reviews
Will give you all the reviews from Motor Authority.
For more specific custom calls you may use these parameters:

• uid – your user ID
• cat – you can choose: reviews / bottom-line / tips / blogs
  If you wish to get just the summaries of the bottom-line use: bottomline-summary
• media – Use 0 for strip html and media=1 to have our HTML format in the call.
• from/to – Use unix time stamp (e.g. 1206514800 and yes… the ‘from’ need to be lower then the ‘to‘)
• limit – Up to 100 items. The default is 10.
• limited-links – When it’s equal 1 we will give you just 5 links per item.
• version – You will only need it if you wish to get reviews for cars that are older then 2008. Then use: version=0
• morelinks – Use 1 if you wish to get links from thecarconnection.com or 0 if you don’t want links.

(*) Note that the bold parameters are mandatory.

If you wish to have quality automotive content on your site please feel free to approach High Gear Media
(feedback at HighGearMedia.com) and get a user ID. With more then 1000 new items of content per month, there are something for every car lover girl.