Namespace Awareness Week

Posted by sporkmonger

Written October 1st, 2005

FeedTools 0.2.15 includes the beginnings of namespace support for FeedTools. Namespace awareness was one of the last few features that I had on the list to have in for 0.2. Once those are fully in place I’ll be moving on to putting in more advanced, higher level features like subscription management with OPML import/export.

Version 0.3 will likely include some significant API changes, just as the jump from 0.1 to 0.2 did. Just a heads-up.

Still remaining on the to-do list for 0.2:

full namespace awareness
proper encoding/charset handling with iconv
dealing with relative urls
dealing with malformed feeds with multiple root nodes

(i.e. All the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.)

Patches are, of course, welcome! The parts of the code that need work are marked clearly with TODO in big all-caps letters. The unit tests for atom support could really use some work too. By which I mean, there’s only one or two tests right now. It’s definately the most undertested portion of the library.

Oh, yeah. And the API page has returned after a long hiatus due to lighttpd config file woes. (I made the mistake of copying from an example config file that contained a couple of unneccessary url rewrites. Those rewrites munged up the index files and the redirects and generally wreaked havoc on all things not-rails.) Apologies for not getting that back into working order sooner.

Tags: feedtools, namespaces, xml

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topfunky :

Written October 1st, 2005 at 05:08 PM
That’s great to hear that you are improving FeedTools. I’m going to be using it in a big project and will need some of those features.

Other useful features (I might submit these as a patch if I get to it first):
- Auto-discovery of RSS meta tag from an HTML page (i.e. send http://sporkmonger.com and extract the link/alternate/rss+xml)
- Saving/conversion of a site’s .ico to PNG with RMagick
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Bob Aman :

Written October 1st, 2005 at 07:04 PM
Auto-discovery is planned as a version 0.3 feature.

I really want to concentrate on the above mentioned features for 0.2, but certainly, if you submit a patch for it, I would consider bumping it up into an earlier version.

I mentioned how I want auto-discovery for FeedTools to work in this post.

Regarding the icon issue, I’m pretty sure that that falls outside the scope of what FeedTools is trying to do. It would be a feature that I personally might even find useful, but I’m just not sure I think it fits here. And a dependancy on RMagick isn’t something I really want to deal with in FeedTools. It’s probably better to have it as an external accessory.
123456

unless feed.link.nil? link_uri = URI.parse(feed.link) favicon = link_uri.scheme + "://" + link_uri.host + "/favicon.ico"end
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topfunky :

Written October 1st, 2005 at 09:59 PM

No problem. I’ll work on that on my own.

The icon method might also give me the root favicon url that I’m looking for.
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Bob Aman :

Written October 3rd, 2005 at 06:06 PM

Possibly, but the icon method may theoretically also give you a gif or a jpeg.
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carl :

Written October 6th, 2005 at 05:24 PM
It seems FeedTools is broken under Ruby 1.8.3 – Well, at least, I noticed some problems once I’d upgraded!

The fix is to change the lines 355 and 385 in lib/feed_tools/feed.rb (I installed from the gem) to something like :
```
self.http_response.each_header do |key,value|
  self.http_headers[key.downcase] = value
end
```
I notice line 385 doesn’t have the downcase – Is this intentional?

Regards, Carl.
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Bob Aman :

Written October 7th, 2005 at 01:24 PM

Hmm. I was actually planning on installing 1.8.3 later today to check if anything broke.

No, the missing downcase on line 385 was unintentional and has been fixed.

Your corrections have been put in for 0.2.16 and I’ll try to get that out as soon as possible for you guys.

Thanks for the heads-up!

Sporkmonger

purveyor of fabulously ambiguous eating utensils

Namespace Awareness Week

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