As part of an ongoing XML/RSS conversation, just delivered an RSS presentation to the campus webmasters group. My piece was on using mt-rssfeed.pl to integrate external RSS feeds into MT-driven sites. Also covered working the db cache path so that mt-rebuild.pl can do its work via cron. Went well.
There sure are a lot of people reinventing the wheel out there, building XML/RSS systems from scratch when there are already a zillion perfectly good tools. I think a lot of the duplicated effort is less a result of need and more a matter of geeks scratching itches. Nothing wrong with that.
Music: Brian Eno :: Needles in the Camel’s Eye
Possibly, it is because the documentation for most software, open or closed source, is obtuse and impenetrable (unless, or course, you already know how to use it). Zope and Tapestry, two of the best dynamic web-publishing frameworks in existence, come easily to mind.
I followed the mt-rssfeed.pl link above to a ‘faceted category wiki’, and found another example. And I’m technically literate. Pity the poor soul confronted with the goofy term ‘wiki’ for the first time.
But you’re dead right about re-inventing the wheel, Scott.
So, are ya gonna post the how-to on mt-rebuild?
I’ve been playing with MT lately, but can’t get rebuild to work.
I’ll provide my presentation notes on request. Just sent them to you chris.
If it’s no trouble, I wouldn’t mind taking a look at those notes myself….thanks!
Any timeframe on when the main http://www.berkeley.edu/calendar and /news sites will have their own RSS feeds? At the moment I am scraping the event site and generating my own RSS feed, and was considering writing a scraping script for the news page, but I’d prefer to use an officially sanctioned feed.
Thanks,
Tim, I don’t know, but I know how to find out. Stand by and I’ll post here later.