RSS 2.0 Feeds Added
Seven days and several thousand expletives later I finally get my RSS feed generator built. Now all I need is some content...
A little later than planned and still not entirely satisfactory, my RSS 2.0 feed generator finally rolls out. Why is this such a big deal? Mostly because the filtering of my entries by category (in the database) was a complete nightmare to implement, but also because I didn't make my feed generator the conventional way.
Where most people would opt for pulling their entries out of their database and then loop through each row, echoing out the data into <item>s as they go, I took a rather different approach. Instead, I have the main landing-page created as per normal
(a process which in its self is rather an unusual one that I'm sure few others would commonly consider) and then transform it on the server side with XSLT. I did originally intend to have the XSLT performed on the client side, but quickly realized that most browsers are pretty hopeless in one way or another when it comes to XML and its related technologies (Firefox in particular being an especially ignorant beast). So I decided to put all that extra load on my host machine instead. Oh what fun.
Almost as difficult as implementing my feed generator, is deciding what the hell I do next. I'm a bit tempted to add a stylesheet to generate Atom feeds. Actually implementing the RSS 2.0 specification made me realize just how rough it is and makes me want to implement a much better sounding feed standard. Anyone that's become accustomed to the quality of the Recommendations that spew forth from the W3C would probably find the RSS 2.0 specification to be somewhat vague and strange.
As tempting as it is to implement a decent feed standard, there's the glaringly obvious fact that there's plenty of other stuff to fix too. The CSS could certainly do with some major improvements and the functionality for people to be able to register and actually post comments are pretty high on the list too. I'm sure at least someone reading this stuff would welcome the opportunity to tell me what an idiot I am.
Well whichever I decide, I guess I'd better go and get on with it. Adios for now folks and perhaps, if I'm lucky, you'll see something amazing and spectacular appear here in the near future.
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