Due to popular request we’ve now added Category support into our API.

If you haven’t already installed the Howcast Gem you can do so with: “sudo gem install howcast”

To get you up and running here is some sample code to interact with the Category taxonomy.

The Howcast Gem is a pure Ruby wrapper for the Howcast API. It aims to encapsulate all the functionality of the Howcast API in pure Ruby — now your Ruby programs can interact with Howcast videos and wiki guides.

You Will Need

• Ruby Installed
• RubyGems Installed

Step 1: Get the Gem

Jump right in and get the code. No better way to learn than experimenting.

sudo gem install howcast-howcast

Step 2: Get Acquainted

Familiarize yourself with the RDoc for the gem. The README file is a great starting point and outlines the functionality you can achieve with the gem. By following the RDoc documentation and the Howcast API Documentation, you’ll quickly find that the gem is incredibly simple to use in your own applications.

Step 3: Get Help

We have a support group for this gem available at: http://groups.google.com/group/howcast-developers/topics. Please use this group and mailing list for all your questions and advice.

Step 4: Stay Tuned

Join our Google Group to receive updates about new features in our API. Also subscribe to this blog to get announcements in your RSS reader about things going on at tech.Howcast.

Step 5: Requests

Something missing from the gem? Other interfaces into Howcast you would like to use? Please let us know by posting on our discussion boards. We will be checking these regularly, responding to your feedback and questions.

The Howcast Google Gadget and the Know How To? Facebook app were both developed using the gem.

For the past several months, we’ve been working hard on getting howcast.com up and running and launching new and improved versions of our product. Along the way we’ve learned a lot! We’d like to share some of that with you and hope that it’ll save you some time and provide you with some solution options for different projects. You’ll be seeing us post about different engineering problems that we’ve solved (Ruby, Rails, Flash, and Flex), how we use different commercial and open source packages and tools, and some general thoughts on different topics from time to time.

To get things started we’d like to announce the Howcast API v0.1! We are starting off small and providing a simple REST API to read video and wiki guide data. You can use the Howcast API to get lists of videos/guides with various filters; search for videos and guides, and retrieve information about a particular video or wiki guide.

For a full list of supported APIs, please refer to our API Documentation.

We are currently in active development of the Howcast API. To stay up to date with new features, or to share comments and ideas on how to make the API better, please join the discussions on our Google Group. We will notify members of the group as we release changes or enhancements.

Our Google gadget and Facebook application both use the API and we hope you find it useful as well! If you develop an application that leverages the API, please be sure email us at api+apps@howcast.com. We may feature your application on howcast.com!