I posted an article just over a year ago about an RSS feed of the London Underground Tube Status that I'd created by scraping the TFL website. I was overwhelmed not only by the response via comments and emails, but also by the sheer number of people using it (my apache access logs increased by 7GB per month!) that I decided to make a full blown API so that it would be easier for developers like me to create great mashups using data that should always have been publicly accessible.

I'm happy to announce that after a good test run at the Rewired State event a couple of weeks ago, the Tube Updates API is now live and ready to be used at tubeupdates.com/ - You can request updates from any line (including the Docklands Light Railway) in either JSON or XML format and everything is structured to give you as much information as possible e.g. station closures, why there are 'minor delays', etc.

But that's not all! I am caching the data (and have been since 1st Jan 2009) so you can also go back in time and look at the underground system at any point in time! I wrote a rather rudimentary stats analyser for my Rewired State project which shows you the basic reliability over the past couple of months but that is just a taster of what you can do with the information now available.

I'll be releasing new versions of the RSS feed shortly so that non-developer types can still access the data - I'll be announcing those on this blog and on my twitter feed once they are ready in the next few days. In the mean time, please play around with the API. There are no real usage terms but I'd love to know how you are using it so please get in touch if you make use of it!

For those that come to this site regularly, you may have noticed that it's undergone a major overhaul! I've done a complete redesign (looks best in Safari) and replaced the blog engine with Wordpress so I should be blogging a lot more frequently. I'm also about to become a full time freelance PHP developer and web consultant but I'll be posting more details about that soon!!