RoseRSS (public announcement)

[stobor]

So, those of you that follow my other blog already know about this. But I figured more people might want to know that over the past couple weeks I've been developing an unofficial RSS feed for the Rose-Hulman News page. Its a perl script that scrapes the content out of the pages, dumps it into a database, and builds the xml file for the 20 most

Comments

Re: Rose webmasters

[stobor]

Yeah, I guess 'shrugged off' may have not been the best phrasing. I gathered from when i dug through the site that it was very chaotic and it wouldn't be easy to add, but I kind of figured that RSS was a question that had been brought up more than once, and I wasn't given a response that suggested it was coming any time soon. If the email had said "yes, we have an awesome new student-designed framework that might allow for this kind of thing, and we are investigating using it," I probably wouldn't have been as motivated to write the aforementioned script.

I guess I am just really surprised at how 1995ish the Rose site still is. The top undergrad engineering school in the country should be able to pull together the talent to make a site that doesn't use flash for some of its main content(somebody please make that ticker in JS already...), wasn't made in frontpage, and kept a consistent design throughout all pages.

I really get into backend programming just because i know I cant design frontends, and it just hurts me to see a bunch of static pages all over the place that require special frontpage editing or something.

There's a lot of web design talent at Rose - I know, I've seen it. If they put out a workstudy job to redesign the page (give a couple students a year or something, not just 10 weeks during the roughest quarter), I bet they'd have a few really good applicants. I'm not trying to be mean of the current developers who probably inherited a worse design and truly have improved it a lot, its just the way websites are made today is a lot different and the site could use some new blood (not just new pictures on the front page).