Lance's TextBox

Catch GDException

This is an email I just got (click to enlarge):

Don't you hate those instances of GDException?

posted @ Friday, October 19, 2007 12:20 PM | Feedback (0) |

Tag Unions

Jon Udell is asking for a service to deliver a feed containing the union of tagged items from various services.  I've been doing this for a while (though not for astronomy) using RSSBus.  Here's my script:

<rsb:set attr="feed#1" value="http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/[tag]" />
<rsb:set attr="feed#2" value="http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/[tag]" />
<rsb:set attr="feed#3" value="http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=[tag]&lang=en-us&format=rss_200" />
<rsb:set attr="feed#4" value="http://connotea.org/rss/tag/[tag]" />
<rsb:set attr="feed#5" value="http://wordpress.com/tag/[tag]/feed" />

<rsb:set item="_meta" attr="rss:title" value="Tag Union" />
<rsb:set item="_meta" attr="rss:description" value="A combination of various tagging services" />

<rsb:call op="feedUnion">
    <rsb:push />
</rsb:call>

I saved this as tagUnion.rsb and subscribed to http://localhost/rssbus/tagUnion.rsb?tag=astronomy in FeedDemon, And here's what the resulting feed looks like.  Notice in the screenshot the detail that the RSSBus feedUnion operation gives me.  For Flickr results, just the picture, its description, and the photo owner are included in the description.  But look at the next result, all the rich data that is included in the feed, including the date of the tag, the source(s) where the tag was found (this one was found tagged in both delicious and connotea), and all the rich data from the original source (the taxo: elements).

posted @ Thursday, October 11, 2007 3:25 PM | Feedback (0) |

RSSBus and Atom

Sam Ruby pointed out some of the changes that would be required for Feed Validator to support the new RSS Profile.  The RSS Profile is the result of checking popular feed reader capabilities in order to put together a "best practices" document for feed publishers.  I haven't gotten to read through the entire profile yet, but here are some interesting things I noticed while reading through Sam's validator changes:

• Encoding - the profile says to use hexadecimal entity encoding (ie, & instead of &).
• The profile says that all item elements SHOULD appear after all other elements in the channel.  Good.
• "For these reasons, a feed should contain an atom:link"...  They're also recommending content:encoding elements too.

I wish they'd replace a few SHOULD's with MUSTS and make this a new version of the spec that actually contains some precision.  :)

Now that the Atom Publishing Protocol is a proposed standard, standard.  I started wondering how well RSSBus plays with Atom and APP.

• RSSBus allows you to output any feeds (the ones you create or the ones you're calling) in the Atom format.  RSS happens to be the default, but any feed can easily be output as Atom using the @ATOM querystring value.  Actually the output format of a feed is a completely open interface, so custom feed formatters can be created by anyone.  RSS, Atom, HTML, JSON, and Excel feed formatters come installed with RSSBus.
• RSSBus allows you to consume and manipulate Atom feeds.
• RSBScript will allow you to create RESTful interfaces by using the rsb:script tag and its "method" attribute.  For an example of this, look at the REST.rsb demo that comes installed with RSSBus.  It shows how to respond to specific http methods GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.
• One weakness is that RSSBus does not automatically recognize Atom entry inputs (the application/atom+xml;type=entry content-type).  It would be a cool feature if RSSBus could recognize this when it comes in and automatically parse the incoming entry into easily scriptable input attributes.  Instead, an xpath formatter needs to be used to get at the individual pieces of a posted Atom entry.  This is an area where a new set of Atom specific formatters could be useful.

posted @ Thursday, October 11, 2007 2:27 PM | Feedback (0) |

Rock on! IPWorks v8 Released!

Wow, I can have a V8!  Thanks to the hard work of some very talented developers, who I saw working late hours coding and testing, the next version of IPWorks is here!  Yep, /n software announced today the release of IP*Works! V8 .Net and Java Editions.

I got to work a lot with IPWorks v8 during its beta period, and my favorite thing about this version update is the new custom types and collections.  I used the new Atom and Rest components, which are useful and easy to use.  Other new features that I have already used a lot are the firewall/proxy auto-detection, support for NTLM authentication, greater XPath support in the XMLp component (which I use all the time), stream support.

Also, this new update includes the support I want for my Vista x64 machine, and IPv6.

posted @ Wednesday, October 03, 2007 5:25 PM | Feedback (0) |