title: Confused about idempotency, PUT, GET, POST, etc
body: <p>Most of the discussions about these topics are about how to form a URL or how to request a resource.  Let me describe what I'm doing and see if the community can help me restate my problem in the more web-design-professional language :-)</p>
  
  <p>I'm building a piece of hardware that I suppose you'd call a "web appliance".  Similar to an online weather station, it will sit on a home LAN and send messages to a remote server.  Let's say that every 5 minutes it will send a record of:</p>
  
  <pre><code>timestamp
  temperature reading
  unit ID #
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The "web page in the sky" that is collecting this data is a Ruby-on-Rails app containing tables for device ID's and samples.</p>
  
  <p>I want the web appliance to be able to directly post new samples to the "samples" data table by composing an URL similar to the following:</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://kevinswebsite.com/samples/new?timestamp=2011_Oct_01_1440&amp;unit_id=75&amp;temp=75.5" rel="nofollow">http://kevinswebsite.com/samples/new?timestamp=2011_Oct_01_1440&amp;unit_id=75&amp;temp=75.5</a></p>
  
  <p>The above should create a record that at 2:40PMon October 1, 2011, Unit #75 reported a temperature of 75.5 degrees.</p>
  
  <p>Is something like this possible?</p>
  
  <h2>Thanks,</h2>
  
  <p>Kevin</p>