Misunderstanding REST only to reinvent it in a more complex way. If your API speaks JSON, it's not REST unless/until you jump through all of these hoops to build a hypermedia client on top of it to translate the bespoke JSON into something meaningful.

Everyone ignores the "hypermedia constraint" part of REST and then has to work crazy magic to make up for it.

Instead, have your backend respond with HTML and you get everything else out of the box for free with a real REST interface.

Whee!

  #!/usr/bin/perl
  
  $ENV{'REQUEST_METHOD'} =~ tr/a-z/A-Z/;
  if ($ENV{'REQUEST_METHOD'} eq "GET") {
      $buffer = $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'};
  }
  
  print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
  
  $post_id = $buffer;
  $post_id =~ s/&.*//;  # Get first parameter (before any &)
  $post_id =~ s/[^a-zA-Z0-9\._-]//g;  # Sanitize input
  
  $truncate = ($buffer =~ /truncateContent=true/) ? 1 : 0;
  
  $title = `mysql -u admin -p'password' -D blog --skip-column-names -e "SELECT title FROM posts WHERE url='$post_id'"`;
  chomp($title);
  
  $content = `mysql -u admin -p'password' -D blog --skip-column-names -e "SELECT content FROM posts WHERE url='$post_id'"`;
  chomp($content);
  
  if ($truncate) {
      # Extract first paragraph (everything before the first blank line)
      $first_paragraph = $content;
      $first_paragraph =~ s/\n\n.*//s;
      
      print "<h3><a href=\"/$post_id.html\">$title</a></h3>\n";
      print "<p>$first_paragraph [...]</p>\n";
  } else {
      print "<h1>$title</h1>\n";
      print "<p>\n";
      print "$content\n";
      print "</p>\n";
  }