Month: June 2004

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FEED ON FEEDS ala Bloglines

Ok, I warned you I was going to hack at FEED ON FEEDS a bit, and I did, just a little bit…

My main goal was to make it function a little bit more like Bloglines, and so far we’ve got this. (Click for full size versions.)

Bloglines feed list

(Example of Bloglines list of subscribed feeds)

Hacked FEED ON FEEDS feed list

(Example of hacked FEED ON FEEDS list of subscribed feeds)

So they’re starting to look similar, but I’ve also got some of the functionality replicated as well. For instance, in my hacked FEED ON FEEDS just loading a feed’s items marks that feed as ‘read’ – there is no manual marking needed, no checkboxes to check, or links to click. I like it this way and became accustomed to it in Bloglines, so I had to have it here.

I don’t know how much farther I’ll take things, but I might hack at little bits of it here and there if I get motivated, or you know, actually get involved in the development, though the fear of commitment to yet another project makes me not want to get into things too deep…

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AutoValidator 0.2.5

I thought I should actually get around to releasing the AutoValidator… From the README:

This is the AutoValidator, a program that can help you make sure your web
pages are valid.

The AutoValidator takes a list of URLs from a text file, and checks them
using the W3C MarkUp Validator. You can use the W3C’s validator located at
<http://validator.w3.org/> or you can install the W3C's validator on your
own server, as the source code is available:
<http://validator.w3.org/source/>

This is what the sample output looks like, but it’s quite customizable. Don’t expect state of the art OOP code here, it’s just more of the same old Perl-hackery, but it works for me…

If you’re a validation nut, and find it useful, let me know…

(Note: AutoValidator 0.2.6 fixes a very minor bug, not worth upgrading, but grab this instead if you’re a first timer.)

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Super-Happy-Terrific FEED ON FEEDS?

Mr. Genehack suggested I look at FEED ON FEEDS as a "Super-Happy-Terrific Aggregator", and while I have used it before, it’s gone through a number of updates since then. Perhaps enough for me to hack at it a bit and see if it’ll do what I want.

Phil suggests using Mark’s Universal Feed Parser, which is what I too would want to see happen, as I’ve mentioned before… Even if it’s an optional thing, where you could choose to use the Universal Feed Parser or FEED ON FEEDS mechanism, it would be cool.

As for the UI of FEED ON FEEDS, the framed version is nice, but I’d like to see it look a little cleaner, perhaps similar to Bloglines. In fact, I’d like to see some of the functionality mirror what Bloglines does, where just viewing a feed marks it as read, without having to explicitly click things. It looks like the tables in MySQL could use a few more columns. Items are marked with a timestamp that appears to denote when it was downloaded, not the actual time of the entry. RSS 2.0 has pubDate, and Atom 0.3 has issued, modified and (possibly) created, on a per-item level, can’t these be used instead?

Since FEED ON FEEDS is open-source, and released under the GPL I could certainly hack some of these changes into it. The only thing stopping me is my lack of time, and my lack of PHP skills… In other words, I’ll start hacking on it very soon…

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Time for the Java

I hadn’t really planned on it, but it looks like this is the year I’ll learn Java. And by that I mean actually programming in Java.

I’ve toyed with Java in the past. I even use a text edit written in Java, and have written some macros in Beanshell, a Java compatible scripting language, but the time has come to go all the way, and learn the Java.

I’ve installed Tomcat and started to play with JSP, but feel like I’ve got a long way to go. There’s Cocoon, and JSTL, and Struts and all sorts of things I only have passing knowledge of. I’ve used Velocity, read about Lucene, built stuff with Ant, but have never felt comfortable with Java the way I have with Perl.

I’m sort of excited and dreading it, all at the same time. ;)

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Super-Happy-Terrific Aggregator

Rogers wants a gluttonous aggregator, and Les is an Info Freak when it comes to aggregation, so here’s what I’d like to see, do, wish for…

First we need an indexer, some code that is smart about ETags and Last-Modified headers, and redirects, and all that jazz, and we also need something to parse all that incoming data into something useful. Mark‘s Universal Feed Parser seems to be capable of all that. So, we set that up as the piece of the puzzle that grabs data, and parses it, and with a little more glue, stores that data.

Where to store that data? MySQL seems like a nice place. So, we use the Universal Feed Parser to fill up MySQL with all this raw data, and where do we go from there? Anywhere we want. Confused? Here’s what I’m thinking… Once we’ve got all this raw data, we can write code that does all sorts of crazy stuff with it, and that code can be Perl, Python, PHP, or even Java – anything that can talk to MySQL really.

Ideally it would be cool if MySQL had a base table with the raw data, and then different people could write different code in different languages that did different things. Think Different and all that.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking about. I think this would allow people to have a common base, that being data stored in a SQL database, and at that point it doesn’t matter if it came from RSS 0.91, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3 or whatever, as long as we can figure out some sort of base data model we’re set.

I don’t know if this would work, or who else would be interested in such a thing, but figured I should throw it out there instead of just rolling it around in my head.