Though still labouring under the shadow of a miserable cold, I've managed to get a few things done of late.
I've started on a new OO module for fun. It's based on someone else's code, but it's rather fun, and it's a nice learning exercise.
This weekend I started the first phase of my own site upgrade, it's been in the works for nearly 9 months, but has languished through lack of urgency and effort. Other than updating all the HTML to XHTML1.1, and giving the stylesheets a face lift, I've also had my better half proof read the text - which has made a huge difference! The hard part now is to fix the technical side which needs restructuring and a lot of editing. Once it's all done it'll get translated into French...
brian d foy and the other members of the Perl RSS team have release XML::RSS 1.x this February. I had to keep up with the changes, as it turned out that 1.00 had a bug so it's now gone to 1.01, just after I updated the site. Next I have to check how my XML::RSS::Tools behaves on top - I think it should be okay, but it needs testing.
On the RSS front Mark Pilgrm has a nice article over on XML.com, called Parsing RSS At All Costs, where he discusses some of the problems with commercial RSS feeds. Matts wrote his RSS Mirroring Tool, and I use a chunk of it in my XML::RSS::Tools, and I see that the latest XML::RSS does the same. However neither cope with the rubbish that many sites produce, as Mark says The Register is only usable 2 days per month!
My better half is getting urges to learn something new. She is not happy with her job at the moment, and frankly I'm not happy either, as it's a civil-service job, and it sounds like they couldn't find their own arse even with a map, which means I'm paying for the governments incompetence.
Tomorrow is the village annual litter pick up day. I can't say I'm keen to spend the day in the drizzle removing other people's rubbish, that's what I pay taxes for, but it's a good opportunity to build bridges within the village. The place does look a tip, it's sad to see field boundaries and country lanes with McDonald's rubbish strewn across them, especially as the nearest one is over 12km away.
