Blog posts

The highly anticipated last.fm/audioscrobbler web services are now live (in beta). For now they seem to consist of XML serializations of a variety of user, artist, tag, group, and forum data, but with far more data than they’ve provided in this form before. As I discuss a couple of music-related projects with friends, I’m sure these’ll come in useful. I’m a little surprised not to see FOAF profiles listed within that page (instead there’s a less standard XML offering), especially since FOAF is available, but it may be that they’re holding off because RDF is to come soon. ...

A review also posted at amazon.com of Eric Jacobsen’s Sidewalks In The Kingdom: The urban sprawl that blights the USian landscape has had more impact than merely the growth of ugly landscapes. It has broken apart communities, led to less healthy lifestyles, and increased ghettoization. Jacobsen’s book sets out to introduce Christian groups into the new urbanist agenda, calling for walkable neighborhoods, more community-focussed building practices, and support of local business where real relationships can be borne. While this may well be a good primer, anyone who has read any other new urbanist material or who is looking for a thorough theological account may be disappointed. ...

We’ve been away for the past week and time on planes and trains allowed me to focus on some simple unit tests for XML_Feed_Parser. I based the tests on the sample feeds provided in each format’s specification and was able to fix numerous bugs that arose during the testing process, with the only one remaining being some problems handling XML entities. The tests also allowed me to do some refactoring, identifying a few methods that could be eliminated or merged into the parent class since they were the same across all feed types. ...

I’ve bumped the version number for the latest version of XML_Feed_Parser to 0.2.0 to mark a couple of major updates. Firstly, I’ve changed the internal DOM models to public variables. While thinking through the possibilities for improving the extensibility of the package it occurred to me that almost any extension someone wanted to provide would revolve around some use of the DOM, so opening up the internal DOM model would make that nice and easy. Not only can you extend the classes in your own code, you can also do something like: ...

There’s another development version of XML_Feed_Parser up on the dev server. I’ve added support for atom:source and revised atom:author to work with that as per the spec, included the last few parts of core RSS2 support, added full support to the RSS1 module for the syndication and content modules, and partial support for the Dublin Core module. I have yet to see any examples of RSS1 feeds using dc:type, dc:format, dc:identifier, dc:source, dc:language, dc:relation, or dc:coverage. If there’s sufficient demand I’ll add native support for them, but they’re not a critical concern at present. ...

There’s a new version of XML_Feed_Parser up on the development site. 0.1.1devel adds support for enclosures in Atom and RSS2, and for getElementById for RSS1.0. Next on the list are RSS modules, which will allow me to extend enclosures support to RSS1 as well as make the whole thing more flexible.

I wanted to get a few thoughts on this written up, and thought this as good a place as any to post it… Once the code is a little more stable, I’ll probably post it somewhere for others to use. The first phase of the " Collage" experiment has been very successful. Less than a week after the festival it had indexed around 1400 postings, largely made up of over 1100 flickr photos. It’s helped us get a good overview of online discussion of Greenbelt and provided a great supplement to the photographs and reviews already gathered on the festival website. On top of that, it required very little attention over the festival weekend, which is a benefit not to be underestimated. And ‘greenbelt2005’ rose as high as #3 in the top tags of its given week on flickr. ...

Yesterday I added basic RSS1 support to XML_Feed_Parser and began the process of preparing a PEPR proposal to have it included in PEAR. I still need to get the various pages about the module in sync, but the code and a rough to-do list are currently available on my test server. My key desire is to add in support for RSS1 modules and RSS2 namespaces so that I can begin to use it to get at richer content than the base RSS1-spec allows. I’ll probably add some mappings for some of the more common extensions and then define a way for users to interact with those that are less common. If anyone has any preferred ways of doing that, feel free to suggest them in the comments. ...

With a short window between trips out of town I’m trying to focus on getting a number of projects completed so that when things settle down I can start on some new things. Today I’ve been working on Services_Technorati, my PEAR module for working with the Technorati API. I’ve refactored it, reducing the code size by about 30%, added support for the new blogPostTags API call and written the documentation. I’m still waiting for CVS karma to upload the documentation, but the other changes are now available in the form of the first beta version of the package through a PEAR installer near you. ...

After far too long a day of travelling I’m back in the US. The Festival was great, though as tiring as ever (jetlag compensated for the more relaxed on-site schedule). I’ve spent the day catching up on feeds and email, and tinkering with the collage code. For the most part it’s been working well and new content has been picked up pretty quickly, particularly since I added in a technorati watchlist for links to www.greenbelt.org.uk. The one exception was from flickr, where often there’d be more new photos between checks than were included in the feed, meaning that we only had ~100 of the 500 posted. As a quick fix I added the individual ‘greenbelt2005’ feeds for several of the more active flickr users, but now I’ve rewritten the code to use the flickr API to check for all new photos within the last 45 minutes (we check every half an hour, so 45 minutes should make sure nothing falls through the cracks) and pulls them in that way. ...