University work
I’ve already started working on university stuff, mostly because I went back to my flat yesterday morning and picked up most of the stuff. Revision is coming along slowly, and I’ve started writing some of my report for my third year project, although I need to fetch the commented version of my project essay so that I don’t make the same mistakes again. Hopefully by the new year I’ll have one to two thousand words done and enough of the implementation to show something working (I’d quite like the have the ability to login and possibly also to add applicants to the system). I’m really worried about exams and my project though, because I need to do well in order to stand any chance of getting a first in my degree.
Site work
Now that I’ve got a couple of weeks “off”, I’ve been doing a bit of work on some of my web sites. Data Circle has a number of new posts, as does Meme Base, and Politics Watch is coming along slowly. Both Data Circle and Politics Watch have several draft articles which I’m currently working on and hope to publish in the next few days.
I’m also doing a little bit of work on one of my new site ideas, feedread. Basically it’s going to be a web-based RSS reader, a bit like Bloglines and Google Reader, but you’ll also be able to “tag” feeds, like you can with links on del.icio.us.
I’m not sure how it’s all going to work out, and initially the site will just be for my own personal use anyway, but I’m hoping it will be a useful service for more people once it’s all up and running properly. If nothing else I’ll learn quite a bit of Perl in the process, as the script that downloads and parses the feeds will be written in that language and the design that I’ve written so far is already rather large. I’m trying to keep it as simple as possible, but there’s so many things to consider – e.g. what happens when you request a feed and you don’t get a success reponse code? Plus there’s the Robots Exclusion Standard to follow, caching pages so that you don’t make unnecessary requests, and several other factors to take into account.
Anyway, I probably won’t have much time once exams start to work on my sites so I’m trying to get some of them into a state where I can update them without doing too much programming.
Merry Christmas
Seeing as I’m unlikely to post another update before the day itself, Merry Christmas to everyone who reads my blog – I hope your holidays are slightly more relaxed than mine. 🙂
Heh, you are going to be the kind of person who really pisses everyone else off 🙂
However last xmas I did a small draught words of my report, and I thought it was just notes, it actually turned into the main report, and was a helpfull well worthwhile thing to do, so go you!
Hmm, you realise you can tag feeds with google reader? I guess you are going for public tagging? How are you thinking of dealing with their ajaxey goodness? Is there not a cpan module which will do all you want?
Also have you seen: feed on feeds. I actually really liked feed on feeds even compared to googles ajaxy niceness. I moved to google reader because I wanted somethign more centralised after my adsl died.
Merry Christmas to you too 🙂
I didn’t know if you could tag feeds with Google Reader or not, I admit I haven’t really looked at how they do things.
I’ve seen feed on feeds in my referrer logs a few times, not sure if it does quite what I want but I’ll probably have a look and see how they do things as it might give me some hints as to how to proceed.
There isn’t a CPAN module that does everything I want, at least not as far as I know. All the hard work of parsing the feeds is taken care of with XML::Feed, and a crawler that respects robots.txt can be written quite easily using LWP::RobotUA, but unfortunately the latter module doesn’t cache robots.txt files and that’s a feature that I’d like to have. Plus of course there’s all the logic such as if you get a permanent redirect on a feed URL then you want to follow the redirect and update the database to reflect the move. Weeding out dead links is also a problem, and I really want most features to be automatic rather than requiring manual intervention.
Anyway, I’ll see how it pans out in the next couple of months. Given that I’ve got exams soon I won’t be doing too much work on the site until then, and I’m waiting for a book from Amazon that will give me more information on RSS and Atom feeds in general.