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palfrey at 01:46am on 16/05/2004
palfrey at 01:46am on 16/05/2004<geek-mode>
I've spent most of today pissing around trying to build an RSS/OPML/whatever viewer (short version for non-programmers: one application that will show news from everywhere, including LJ updates). Ok, there's about a billion different formats (*slight* exaggeration, but there's 9 varieties of RSS, funny things like Atom feeds, LJ's non-standard use of FOAF, and using OPML to structure feed info isn't standardized at all yet....). Luckily someone wrote a parser for parts of this alphabet soup, so I can do things pretty easy. Combine this with my existing URL cache software (from my comic grabber) and we've got a pretty rapid way to build a very generalized parser with the magic of Python. It builds a tree of news feeds, with all the leaves being individual feeds, and it should be eventually possible to do the feature that's half the reason I'm writing this for, which is to show merged feeds for any given branch (or the whole tree) so that I can get my news in one big block, not as 20 different feeds. Right now, the parser works, it handles everything I throw at it (although I can think of some speed improvements), and I'm trying to throw a GUI on it with wxPython (so we're nice and cross-platform). Unfortunately, wxHtmlWindow seems to be barfing on external images, so may have to work around that until I can find a better fix. I'm also thinking of putting in a little taskbar thing for popping up when there's new stuff to read (if I do that, I'll have to hack wxTaskBarIcon to give it Gnome 2 taskbar support, as no-one's implemented the fd.o specs yet).
</geek-mode>
Having been doing all of this, I've just realised I haven't had proper food in over 24 hours. Biscuits, Kokos Kransen and fruit doesn't count.... too much snack food means I'm not actually hungry. Should really cook things first, snack later. Not easy when your neighbours appear to have decided that the early hours of the morning is a good time to smoke, and so half my damn room smells of dope....
I've spent most of today pissing around trying to build an RSS/OPML/whatever viewer (short version for non-programmers: one application that will show news from everywhere, including LJ updates). Ok, there's about a billion different formats (*slight* exaggeration, but there's 9 varieties of RSS, funny things like Atom feeds, LJ's non-standard use of FOAF, and using OPML to structure feed info isn't standardized at all yet....). Luckily someone wrote a parser for parts of this alphabet soup, so I can do things pretty easy. Combine this with my existing URL cache software (from my comic grabber) and we've got a pretty rapid way to build a very generalized parser with the magic of Python. It builds a tree of news feeds, with all the leaves being individual feeds, and it should be eventually possible to do the feature that's half the reason I'm writing this for, which is to show merged feeds for any given branch (or the whole tree) so that I can get my news in one big block, not as 20 different feeds. Right now, the parser works, it handles everything I throw at it (although I can think of some speed improvements), and I'm trying to throw a GUI on it with wxPython (so we're nice and cross-platform). Unfortunately, wxHtmlWindow seems to be barfing on external images, so may have to work around that until I can find a better fix. I'm also thinking of putting in a little taskbar thing for popping up when there's new stuff to read (if I do that, I'll have to hack wxTaskBarIcon to give it Gnome 2 taskbar support, as no-one's implemented the fd.o specs yet).
</geek-mode>
Having been doing all of this, I've just realised I haven't had proper food in over 24 hours. Biscuits, Kokos Kransen and fruit doesn't count.... too much snack food means I'm not actually hungry. Should really cook things first, snack later. Not easy when your neighbours appear to have decided that the early hours of the morning is a good time to smoke, and so half my damn room smells of dope....
lethargic
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thoughtful