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38 items tagged “rss”

2003

Tim Bray on RSS

Tim Bray: RSS Needs Fixing:

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Letting off some steam

I spent most of today knee deep in RSS, writing an aggregator for a project at work. It has been quickly becoming apparent that “Really Simple Syndication” is anything but! There are currently three major (and goodness knows how many minor) specifications doing the rounds, and the majority of feeds seem to pick and chose between the three at will. Even the three core elements that describe an item (title, link and description) are both optional and heavily overloaded.

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Python power

Sam Ruby’s ultra-simple 3-paned aggregator is a great example of the power of high level scripting languages. Using the wxPython cross-platform GUI toolkit and Mark Pilgrim’s ultra-liberal RSS Parser it provides a full application in a mere 107 lines of (highly readable and maintainable) code.

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2002

RSS2 modules

It seems RSS 2.0 has the capability to support modules (I was under the false impression that this ability was restricted to RDF modules in the rival RSS 1.0 specification). Following a post by Mark Pilgrim on B-linking (the blogging equivalent of a B-movie) Dave Winer has released a draft of blogChannel, the first ever RSS 2.0 module.

effnews part two

Fetching and Parsing RSS Data is the second installment of the effnews project, a series of tutorials on creating an RSS news reader in Python. This time topics covered include exception handling and event based XML parsing using xmllib.

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Hehe RSS3

Forget about RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0, Aaron Schwartz has released a spec for RSS 3.0 :)

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Python RSS tutorials

Spotted on Python owns us: Fredrik Lundh is building an RSS newsreader in Python, and writing Python tutorials on the project as he goes along. The first tutorial, Fetching RSS Files, is available now and covers (in detail) retrieving RSS files over the web, including an excellent explanation of asynchronous HTTP requests.

Python RSS locator

Mark Pilgrim has written an ultra-liberal RSS locator (in Python, naturally). I guess he had to scratch an itch. The amount of work it puts in to locating an RSS feed for a site is astonishing, especially when you consider how short the actual code is.