Fun with technology
The weather is hot and I’ve been busy.
I’m working on Hep 0.3. It should be ready this week. I think you’ll like it.
Mark Pilgrim introduced his new "ultra-liberal RSS locator" today. It’s similar to the code I added to Hep 0.2.3 to do RSS auto-discovery. But it adds one brilliant feature. If it can’t find an RSS feed by scouring the HTML source of a site, it looks the site up in syndic8’s database - a vast repository of RSS feeds, maintained by real people. This means that Hep should be able to find the RSS feed for virtually any web site, without any work on your part.
After trying out Mark’s module I found a bug, where it would crash on sites that had mailto: links. Also it didn’t sort the results it got from syndic8, so sometimes you’d get a list of possible RSS feeds for a site without any way to tell which one was the best. I wrote up a little patch that fixed these things and sent it to him. So now I’ve got a nice little RSS auto-discovery module that works just the way I want it to, plus the satisfaction of contributing to what could be a widely used bit of code.
Also, for the first time in maybe a year I’m going to spend money on gadgets. I read the Best Buy flyer in this weekend’s paper. They’ve got some things on sale that I’d like to own (a wireless network card, and more memory for my laptop).
Oh, and I’m writing this post in my e-mail client. To: weblog@hep. One of the new features in Hep 0.3 :-).
