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 this won’t be annoying to see in my daily feeds.
I usually use Ruby for this because it offers Hpricot, a very nice and fast scraper and XPath interface. This time, I resolved to find something that does RSS generation better, and I stumbled upon RubyRSS, which happens to be in the core ruby distribution!
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Uncategorized
code, generation, gist, github, rss, ruby, rubyrss, scraping, web, xpath
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…
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blogs, computers, internet, lame, rss, web
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.)
Uncategorized
blog, blogging, rss, syndication
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.
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Uncategorized
atom, beer, rss, ruby
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 of the integration between blog events
and life events here.
Gotta start trading stocks in 30 minutes, then eventually go to bed. I’m such
a night-owl.
Uncategorized
rss, timeline, typo
