I've been working on a project for the last while that has, as one aspect, an RSS aggregator to bring together news from a bunch of different related website - nothing earth-shaking there. Problem is one of the sources I want to aggregate is an ezboard forum. The fact that ezboard doesn't have RSS feeds, however, put a bit of a damper on that.

A bit of Google searching made it quite clear that I was not the first person to want to do this, and while I am all for not reinventing the wheel when possible pretty much all I could find were lots of "ZOMG!!1!! I needs RSS from ezboard. PLZ spoon feed me!" forum posts and very little of actual use. In reply to these there were a couple of links to a dead service at http://www.mikeshea.net with the requisite "is gone OHNOES!!1!" replies. Eventually I found a post where someone rather usefully posted a link to the source on Mike Shea's site and I gave it a try.

While there was some wonderful Perl-y goodness to the script, particularly it's ability to deal with a whole bunch of other bulletin board services, the RSS generated was, to put it mildly, badly formed - the worst part for my application was a lack of pubDate tags so the items wouldn't slot in chronologically with the other feeds in my aggregator. Running the script also added about 20 lines of warnings in the error log every time it was executed. The script was all at once overkill and not very useful to me. But not completely useless. I retained the caching and some of the ezboard-specific screen scraping when I rewrote it, so credit where credit is due.

My script is entirely single-purpose, unlike Mike Shea's script it only works with ezboard forums, that's the downside. The upside is what it returns

1. is the right content type ('text/xml')
2. includes a lastBuildDate
3. includes a pubDate for each item
4. includes sticky threads, yet still sorts the thread items in the correct descending order by date/time, and, of course
5. runs without warnings or errors

How to use:

For the cache you'll need a subdirectory under the location of the script that is writable by your http server process.

The script expects three parameters:

1. title - arbitrary text describing the feed. This is what is going to end up inside the <title> tag of the RSS feed. Don't forget to URL encode the string.
2. url - the full URL to the forum you want to make a feed from, URL encoded, of course, and
3. description - arbitrary text  describing the feed, this will end up inside the <description> tag.

Example:

http://yourservername/andpath/ezrss.pl?title=Arbitrary+Title+for+Feed&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpxxx.ezboard.com%2Fmyforumpath&description=Arbitrary+Description+of+the+Specific+Forum

Source code: ezrss.txt

I had a "lead developer" telling me that their application wouldn't work in a frame because if the address bar wasn't visible in the browser the application wouldn't work because it couldn't "see" the parameters in the URL. He meant "see" literally.

In a way I almost envy the guy. He lives in a magical world where servers have mysterious powers to visually read off URLs from the browsers address bar. That must be why MSIE shows the URL in pop-up windows even if the address bar is disabled (and you can have one guess what platform and technology this magician works with).

I asked him to explain how the GET request changes if the address bar isn't there. He said, "I don't want to argue with you."

The worst thing is the developer in question (or questionable developer, as the case may be) has lied to my client and I'm afraid he has convinced them that it was my fault and my only defence, sadly, it trying to give a technical explanation to someone is not in the least technically inclined.

I keep running into this scenario and I feel like I am defending evolution in Tennessee. It is depressing.

This is so completely pointless I'm at a loss to explain what possessed me to do it, nonetheless, I bring you:

Tristan Risk in 3D as ASCII art.

Note that this is not an animated GIF, this is plain text animated with CSS and JavaScript so I can't show it on LJ directly. You'll have to follow the link to see this exercise in astounding uselessness.

It works best if you sit back and squint a little.

I can't tell you how many times the situation as arisen where I have wanted to find a particular old blog entry to refer someone to and struggled to find it. Typically I'd employ one of three methods to find an old post:

• making a rough guess at the date and looking through the subject lines for the months near when I think I might have made the post,
• making a rough guess at the date and looking at the image folders on my server for a picture in the post, then going to the month in the archive and finding the post, or
• grepping my backup (I run a Perl script nightly that downloads my entries) to find the post.

Grepping is quickest but the results can be so ugly that the other two methods are often more effective. So, today I decided to write a search utility that gives nice, clean results. Finding things in my blog is now a snap. And as it gets bigger (there are already almost 3,000 entries) this will get more useful.

There is also another level of utility to it as well. More than just being a useful tool, it was an exercise in using Perl to pull together elements from my Lotus Domino server, a third-party website, and the file system in a nice, seamless way - which is exactly what I am going to need to do for the leverage the work already done with the artofadornment store for selling prints. There is a plan, it all fits together eventually.

Blah. I have to write a trouble log for a pilot project here at work. I can't even begin to imagine why there isn't a database for this sort of thing, this is precisely what Lotus Notes was invented for. It used to be called Lotus Support Notes for chrissake. I have a database for this at home. Of course I can't get to it because of the freaking firewall.

"Hi, Michael? Can you jump through these hoops, please? Do you mind if we tie your feet together first?"