Reuters has a new
mobile service offering 10 headline stories accompanied with full color photos (via
PhoneMag and
textually.org). The service requires you to download the Mediabricks Media Viewer, a customizable J2ME Java application that is compatible with
various handsets.
I spent a few minutes looking at the Java midlet and found out that you can also access the news articles directly via your browser. I am sure with a small PHP or Perl script you could quickly write your own news engine. Rest assured, Reuters doesn't support it, or they would have made this information available first place (or even better: offer news articles in XML format). So it's up to you what you do with it. Here we go:
Code:
The general url is:
http://reutersnews.co.uk/mb/servlet/MorfServlet?service=TopNews&category=reuters-ad&spkey=Reuters.Ad.UK&country=us&dev=7650&object=
Code:
Before you can use it you must fill in the last parameter 'object'. See further below.
- service
Currently only 'TopNews'
- category
Always 'reuters-ad'.
- spkey
The service provider key. Without the proper key ('Reuters.Ad.UK' or 'Reuters.Ad.US') the service won't work.
- country
Either 'us' for Reuters US news or 'uk' for Reuters UK news
- dev
One of the supported devices - output might differ depending on selected device
e.g.
7650
6670
- object
One of the following paramters:
- Headlines
shows list of latest 10 articles with article ids
example
- Article
shows article (required article id in &aid=)
e.g.
example
- ArticleWithBinaries (required article id in &aid=)
serves article as application/vnd.wap.wmlc
e.g.
example
- ArticleWithImage (required article id in &aid=)
serves article and (if available) article images as application/vnd.wap.wmlc
e.g.
example
- Image (required article id in &aid=)
serves (if available) image of an article
e.g.
example
- Ticker
shows a pretty Reuters tagline
- Structure
shows list of article ids of latest articles
- Startup
serves certificate, structure and ticker as application/vnd.wap.wmlc