Way back in July, there was a fairly big thread ensued on use.perl about people leaving, and keeping track of their journals. In the wake of that I knocked up a bit of code that visits a site, reads the RDF feed, and generates a listing a lot like the use.perl friends page. (Note that RSS 0.91 feeds are a bit useless, as they don't have time metadata. More on that later.)
I've been prompted to revisit it because London.pm is looking at how (and whether) to revamp the site, and it struck acme that maybe collating people's use.perl.org journals would be a good idea. It turns out that plugging the RSS feed of this journal into the CGI works fine, except it doesn't have a timestamp on the entry. (Pudge? Please? :) In any case, hey presto, instant community content!
In a similar vein, I've seen an interesting collection of blogs on haddock.org, which instead of presenting snapshots of entries like my code does, provides a chronology of updates. This is also pretty nifty.
Or am I totally misunderstanding the purpose of rss?
Re:body text
hex on 2002-08-26T10:41:22
I'm not 100% on this, but it looks like they're cramming the start of articles into the <summary>, which smells like a bit of a hack to me. Then again, what do I expect, AI summarisation?Re:body text
blech on 2002-08-26T10:43:52
Possibly, but if you are, you're not the only one.
There seem to be a wide range of RSS 1.0 feeds out there. For example, Matt Webb's Interconnected RSS feed has the full text of entries, whereas a default MT feed has only titles and an 'entry excerpt' (which is usually not manually written, and thus turns out to be the first few lines of the entry). I'm sure there are some people who just send journal entry titles, but I can't think of an example right now.
However, given RSS (possibly) has one of the Ses as short for 'summary', I think expecting full text is probably overly hopeful.Re:body text
jerakeen on 2002-08-26T10:47:26
Then how can all these magic agregator things work, then? The whole point, to me, is being able to use one app to see all the new posts on all my friend's journals, and read them, without having to actually open a web browser for every article.
