Jeff Licquia's (old) Blog

Straw as a Necho Aggregator

Sun, 06 Jul 2003 07:41:00 +0000

As everyone knows who's read the about page, this site uses weblog technology to do its magic. Weblog technology is moving very quickly at the moment, and there's a new effort out there to more clearly define what it's all about. The project started out as "Echo", but it turns out that other software uses that name, so the current working names seem to be "(not) Echo" or "Necho". I'll stick with the latter for now.

The project has decided to start calling for implementations of the current preliminary spec for the syndication feed: the part that does the job of RSS. Most of the emphasis so far has been on developing the feeds themselves, or of translating the feeds into various formats. To my knowledge, no one has hacked any of the software that reads these feeds to read Necho feeds.

At least, that is, until now.

I've been playing around with the Straw news aggregator for the GNOME desktop. It's written in Python (yay!), and is rather well-written; the source is easy to work with. This seemed like a good opportunity for me to contribute to the Necho project and to learn a little about how Straw works at the same time.

The patch is here. (Please be kind to my poor server!) It's a patch against Straw 0.18.1, which can be downloaded from here. Unfortunately, Straw only runs on systems with GNOME, which means only Linux, the BSDs, and other UNIXes; sorry, Windows users. It seems to do pretty well with the Necho feeds I've tried out, including Sam's original test feed and feeds from Joel Spolsky, Phil Ringnalda, and Mark Pilgrim. There are a few quirks; it seems to like using the current time as the last modified time for all posts, for example. I also haven't added handling for authors and contributors, because this involves a level of XML tag nesting that the current handlers don't handle well yet.

I'll try to do my best to keep this up to date, but it's possible that other projects and real life may consume my time for working on this. At the very least, this should provide a starting point for testing Necho's interaction with news aggregators. Comments to this log entry, or E-mail to "jeff+straw" at "licquia.org", are appreciated.

Happy Fourth!

Sat, 05 Jul 2003 00:27:00 +0000

Before the big storms, we went to the Independence Day celebration in Carmel, the town west of us. Carmel has a government center with an elaborate City Hall and a large fountain and sitting area in front. For CarmelFest, the city blocks off the whole area, sets up a stage for live music, has fair-style vendors and local groups set up shop, sets up games and activities behind City Hall, and opens the fountain to swimming.

We don't know if there will be fireworks tonight, but if so, we'll probably go downtown to see them, just like we did last year. As family traditions go, our Fourth routine is pretty good.

We hope you have a happy Fourth as well. Post some comments if you did anything interesting.

Being noticed, CSS, RSS

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 06:12:00 +0000

Motivated by the problems I've been having with weblog tools, I put some effort into the Web site. There's a new CSS-only layout; all tables have been banished. I've switched to pinging blo.gs; they seem to be more flexible in following the sites. So far, it seems to updating; we'll see with this post.

Those people who use RSS should note that the RSS links have changed. The old ones are still supported (and should be for the foreseeable future), but we've now got spiffy new RSS 2.0 feeds as well.

Finally, those people who like the pictures on the site home can rejoice. I've finally fixed the last bug on the auto-picture-post system for our new picture phones, so we can upload a picture to the site directly from our phones. This should increase the likelihood that we'll update the pictures more frequently.

Site layout changes

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 06:03:00 +0000

We've got a new layout. It's very close to the old layout, but you can see it if you look closely. The main difference: no tables, which is a lot easier to work with on the backend.

There are quite a few changes behind the scenes, too. Let us know in the comments if you have any problems.

Not getting noticed anymore

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 21:31:00 +0000

Most of the cool blog tools out there rely on one of two services to know when to check a blog for new information: Weblogs.com and blo.gs. As far as I can tell, each services also watches the other, so you only have to update one service for everyone to get notified. I update Weblogs.com because there's a native Blosxom module for doing this that does its thing automatically.

So, when it seemed that Technorati wasn't paying attention to links I've made to other bloggers, I got suspicious that my Weblogs.com pings weren't happening. Sure enough, blo.gs (which has a search function) doesn't think my blog has updated since the 16th. Looking at the last ping, it appears that Weblogs.com is actually trying to verify an update, rather than just taking my word for it, and the verification is failing.

This makes sense, in a way. The front page of this site only contains the full stories for one section of the blog: the news stories. My section and Tami's are in the sidebar, but only with post titles. I did it this way because I didn't want to inflict my rants on people who just wanted to know how the family was doing. (Incidentally, you can see all three sets of posts munged together with this link. I don't generally advertise or support it, but it's there all the same.)

This way of laying things out made sense to me, and works from a browsing perspective, but doesn't work from the point of view of these new tools. Clearly, I need to reorganize things to be cooperative with non-browsers. The best thing, I think, is to split the two personal logs from the main one, and report different addresses to Weblogs.com for those.

So don't be surprised if things start changing around here.