Today I get this lovely email from google telling me all about the availability of the new Google+ Platform API. So naturally I have to check it out! For a while I have been using facebook and twitter feeds as simplistic blogs for some of my sites, but for my personal site, I would love to just use Google+.

I've created a simple example of how to setup and read your own public Google+ feeds.

Enabling API access and getting your API Key

1. Head over to the APIs Console.
2. Select Services
3. Enable the Google+ API services. Without this you will not be able to access your feeds.
4. Select API Access
5. Under Simple API Access, grab your API Key. Hang onto this as we will need it to access any of the API services.

Getting your Google+ ID

If you don't already know where this is located, head on over to Google+, click on your image in the upper right, and click Profile. In the address bar, it will now have a link like

https://plus.google.com/106670447018211124292

Accessing your activity stream

Now that you have your ID and Key, you can go to the url of your stream. Your stream URL will look like this

https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people/106670447018211124292/activities/public?key=[API Key]

Parsing this stuff in PHP

Thankfully all the responses are in JSON which makes it really easy to read the data. Each item is inside of items.

$id = '106670447018211124292';
$key = 'YOUR KEY HERE';
$feed = json_decode(file_get_contents('https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people/'.$id.'/activities/public?key='.$key));

foreach ($feed->items as $item) {
  echo '<h2>'.$item->title.'</h2>'
    .'<i>'.date('F jS Y @ H:i:s',strtotime($item->published)).'</i>'
    .'<p>'.$item->object->content.'</p>'
    .'<br /><br />';
}

And now we can access our public junk! This feed contains some additional information other than just the title and content. Like if you entered a url, it will attach the url to it inside of object.