Malicious enjoyment derived from observing someone else’s misfortune
 

Tag Archives: rss

Ruby to generate RSS feeds for sites that don’t offer them

There’s this site that has an equipment exchange I wanted to keep track of. Yet, it’s done with what seems to be a custom php file rather than vbulletin, so none of the usual RSS feeds from the site apply to it. So, I decided to make a scraper/feed-generator to get me the latest version every 5 minutes and generate a nice RSS feed, so I can view it in Google Reader. The volume of posting is low enough that [...]

Annoying Web 2.0 Stuff

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if no one ever upgraded to Web 2.0? I mean, really, what have we gained. Here’s a list of things that I personally find really stupid about the phenomenon…

rssHugger and I

So, on November 12th, rssHugger apparently went online. I just found it a few minutes ago and I think I might sign up. It’s a good idea – clump all the blogs together, have each one pay a small fee, and promote the entire collection. This post halfs the price of the service (it should now only cost me $10 for the next 10 years, which seems like a really good deal to me.)

A Beer Atom Feed

So, after reviewing over 50 beers on BeerAdvocate, I’ve come to the conclusion that them not having an RSS or Atom feed of my most recent reviews available is stupid. So, I decided to make my own by scraping their HTML today. I started off by pumping some random code into irb that included Hpricot and Builder. Ruby rocks for doing stuff like this.

Timeline Typo Integration

So, I made it so the Timeline project and javascript libs can now use my custom Typo RSS feed to make pretty timelines. Just did some very simple (but troublesome to debug) modifications of the Timeline and Typo codebases. Trouble was for a while that this… <?xml ….. ?> …is apparently not parsable in the Timeline libs. And it throws some unclosed parenthetical exception. That took me a long time to figure out. Lame. Anyway, you can see the result [...]