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.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To My Next Rant

I was kind of joking around about ZSFF but Erik Peterson grabbed it and went with it showing how it’s just simple enough to work well. He even wrote a validator with ruby source (on the link). His validations go quite a bit further than I intended but that’s a really great job. The ZSFF Ghetto Reader I had in the works actually worked with his .zsff file right away, and my feed passed his validations.

Now that’s team work! Go Team!

I of course had to throw my own 2am hack job ZSFF Ghetto Reader (save as dork…) which is the kind of code I love writing when I’m tired and bored. No stupid unit tests. No code quality. No thought about what it should do first. No diagrams. Just a quick hack to do a little thing I want real quick that I tinker with for fun.

It won’t work if you don’t have Epiphany since I hate waiting for Firefox to load.

Now, a few folks said, “Waaaah! Booohoooo! How do I get the real text of your site Zed?! It’s so damn important that I put every single bit of your ranting goodness into my aggregator so that I can make a mint off your words.”

Understanding that most programmers aren’t good enough to parse HTML and find all the H and P tags… Wait. Ehem. Understanding that XPath and XML parsing sucks so bad most programmers can’t use it to easily find all the H and P tags I decided to solve the problem.

The ZSFF for my site now includes the .page file that has the raw Textile for each blog post. The ZSFF Ghetto Reader will recognize that you’re grabbing a .page file and just show that in the more program. If you’re blind you should like this quite a lot since you can just stream it through a text-to-speech reader probably easier than HTML.

Now, I’m really sick of this ruby code for generating my atom feed. It mostly works but I’m too lazy to master something that should be dead easy. Therefore, I’ve made one last change to my feed.rb file that just makes the ZSFF and that’s it.

If you do your news as a YAML then this feed.rb file is a good start for you probably. It’s again another 2am hack I done up to just get something done, but I’m going to just do a new one in Factor and a good ZSFF reader too that’s all graphical and shit. Maybe screencast how you make a GUI in Factor since I’ve been getting into that.