Mittwoch, 02. Juni 2004, 14:52:21
A while back, I talked about the frustrations of creating my own RSS feed. I was confused - so many RSS "standards", all of them incompatible with each other, all of them hideously complex, and how would I get my blog entries into that friggin' RSS format, what's the point of it anyway?
What was I to do? Which standard should I choose? And how could I implement it in an oderly fashion? For example, would I really have to pour over all my blog entries and come up with <title>s for each entry? And that pathetic ISO date format!
I did what I usually do when confronted with complex decisions: Nothing.
Let Time take care of it.
Eventually, Time did her job and took take care of it. My idle mind settled on a standard, worked out a basic, simple implementation without any of the complex mumbo-jumbo. And last night, I settled down and spent a bit of quality time with my favourite code editor.
The end result is a nice little script that converts my last 15 blog entries into a valid RSS 1.0 feed.
Well, it's valid for now. Let's hope it stays that way. Care to check?
Granted, it's not perfect. There are so many rdf:thingamajig thingies, I just didn't have the nerves to study them all.
But what really bugs me: There's no provision for a language attribute for individual entries; you can only declare the language for the whole feed. The stupidity!
Hey RSS dolts dudes, some of us speak more than one language!
So, what should I do? I have entries in English, and entries in German; some entries are even both in English and German, and also occasionally French. I guess I'll just change the language attribute value every once in a while.
There are certainly other things I haven't handled yet. But it's a start.