Latest News >> 2008-07-20 2008-06-25

I’ve been completely fed up with news/feed/rss/atom readers these days. I use Linux as my primary operating system, and I only have a few feeds that I want to rip through quick so I can get to reading the content. Yet, trying to find a reader that doesn’t suck donkey balls has been a chore.

2008-06-21

Wanna know what all the Ruby vulnerabilities are? Or at least have a fun look at how to search through code for clues? It’s a blast.

2008-06-13

I’m dropping a large blog post on everyone to just say that I haven’t died, I’ve just been busy working on my book for A/W about Mongrel. I had contracted with them to do a book about deploying Mongrel, but then decided it wouldn’t be a very good book since we’d already done one about that topic and there wasn’t too much more to say.

Back To Black, Introducing ZSFF

The first cut of the site was more like this. All black background and a few little images and elements. I decided to go back to that and to touch up a few things here and there, but mostly the same old site.

One thing that’s impressive is just how small this layout is and yet still it functions nearly everywhere. I may never do another CSS only layout again. I’m starting to wonder how the fuck we got sucked into that crap, especially if the only way to really get a good looking layout with CSS and div tags is with mountains of stylesheets, html, and sometimes some damn javascript.

I’m not kidding about the javascript. I’ve seen people desperately trying to force their square-peg 3 column layout through the CSS round hole resort to javascript tricks to force the columns in the right spots.

C’mon now, if just switching to a damn table gets the job done then fuck your stupid pride and do it. It’s not gauche to do what’s easiest and nobody’s going run you out of Designer Town (population 100) with sharpened pitchforks and blazing torches.

Obviously now that I’ve changed the layout it’s going to not work for some asshole with IE 5.0. Oh well.

Atom Feeds Suck

News readers are picky. The order of the elements matters. The format of URLs matters. The date format matters. Every tiny little brittle piece of Atom and the 10+ RSS standards matters.

Yet, all I want is for a damn chunk of news to show up in my stupid reader like it’s email.

After struggling to get the atom feed to work for all the people who use Nazi readers I started to think: why the hell are we using feed formats like this? Could it be done simpler?

Taking a look at the various formats, I’ve decided that I want this format:

  • It’s a fucking flat file based on the HTTP standard.
  • First line is a version header.
  • HTTP style headers follow that, but simplified. These set info like Author, Title, Subtitle, etc.
  • An empty newline then a set of URLs only separated by newlines. Top one is most recent.
  • The URLs have to be universally unique and simply point at the damn news in HTML format.
  • It’s the news reader’s job to keep track of what it’s seen and show new stuff, no matter what order these URLs are in.

I want to call this format “Zed’s STFU Feed Format”. I’ll be writing a set of libraries to implement this pretty soon. Anyone interested in helping out just ping me and I’ll hook you up when I get it going.

ZSFF Starter Sample

I took the 10 minutes it takes to parse this and then another 10 to figure out I fucked it up, but look at the annotation in this simple Ruby chunk of code to get people started with trying to parse it.

You can try the feed file at: http://www.zedshaw.com/feed.zsff

Use the paste bin link above to post your versions of the same thing I cranked out in Ruby in like 10 minutes.