Announcing Planet use Perl! (Sorta.)

Aristotle on 2005-03-26T02:45:37

This one goes out to all my fellow aggregator junkies.

I do not at all like the RSS feed for the most recently updated journals as it comes. That it has no entry content is only a slight annoyance compared to the fact that it does not point to individual entries, just to journals. As such I never have any indication of how many entries anyone has written since the last time I read their posts.

So I did what any good hacker does and fixed the situation myself. The resulting XSLT stylesheet does not use its input document at all, it pulls the relevant RSS feeds itself using the document() function. Feed it any old source document (I use one consisting solely of <null/>) and watch a fulltext Atom feed come out the other side.

Beware, though: it pulls 21 pretty large generated files from the server every single time it runs. Do not run this too frequently, that would be rude.

That is most likely fixable with a certain amount of hoop jumping. I will take a stab at it sometime in the near future.

In the meantime, if you want frequent updates, you should probably subscribe my copy of the output feed instead. It updates every 4 hours, so please don’t hit it more frequently than that.

Enjoy.

PS.: feel free to look at the full list of scraped feeds I provide.