I certainly have topic holes. Some things are just too big to put in LJ. Or I'm not ready to commit to deciding who gets to see, and who doesn't, and spend hours on a "this amazing life-changing thing happened to me at Dreaming!" - I just can't. And they are things I *most definitely* don't want my mother to see. Dear woman, she just... she's breakable LOL.
Wow. You're writing the webserver to serve up the content? And your own feed reader?
I certainly can't argue against it, if it sounds like fun. To me that's just a bit like thinking up a cool T-shirt design, and then inventing a cotton gin and textile mill to make the shirts. >8->
More like thinking up a cool t-shirt design, fiddling with the manual for a stock cotton gin and textile mill, and recognizing that the stock gin and mill were designed to pump out the old t-shirt very quickly, but they don't quite work right with this new design. After days of poring through the thousand-page documentation of arcane (but ready-made) gin and mill pieces you can stick together, you finally come up with a configuration of pieces that should get you about 90% of the way to your t-shirt. To finish the other 10% you'll have to engineer a special tool to fit into a particular mill attachment. In order to build your piece for the mill, you'll need high-quality (and thus high-cost) titanium micro-gears familiar only to a few high-tech shaman-sheep-farmers in Tanzania. And there's still no guarantee that it'll work without welding something into the mill itself
( ... )
As for the feed reader, that's currently sitting at about 150 lines of Python and 300 lines of XSLT. It would be under 150 lines of XSLT if RSS2 didn't use icky RFC 2822 date format. I'm still a little sore about that.
But feeds really are essentially that simple. All a reader really needs to do is pull the feeds off the web, glue them all together, and organize the information that the human actually wants to see. Then it can get out of the way and let the user's regular web browser handle the rendering.
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:: hugs :: all around.
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I certainly can't argue against it, if it sounds like fun. To me that's just a bit like thinking up a cool T-shirt design, and then inventing a cotton gin and textile mill to make the shirts. >8->
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But feeds really are essentially that simple. All a reader really needs to do is pull the feeds off the web, glue them all together, and organize the information that the human actually wants to see. Then it can get out of the way and let the user's regular web browser handle the rendering.
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