I typically use Liferea for keeping track of RSS feeds (works great at school so I don’t waste as much time browsing websites) but, for whatever reason it isn’t working right for me on my laptop. “So,” I thought, “why not create my own little dealie using some Ruby and some pairs of Shoes? I mean, I’m sure it will be straightforward, right?”

Ha. Ha.

First of all, I went looking for some Ruby RSS libraries. There are a few out there. I tried simple-rss, because it seemed nice and…simple. Installed just fine, ran it using this site’s feed. It crashed. Didn’t work at all. Lame. Looked a few others, but they seemed to have a few too many dependencies or were out of date.

But, wait! Ruby comes with it’s very own RSS parser (and generator) in the standard library! Great! Too bad the documentation is lacking and confusing at best. I managed to find a nice little article over at rubybook.ca (haven’t really investigated the site much) which has some details about parsing RSS and Atom with the standard library. Awesome.

Then I got sidetracked by something else. I wanted to be hip and not disturb the webservers too much, so naturally I wanted to use conditional GETs so that if a feed hasn’t been updated I don’t download the whole thing again. Seems like a great idea. Then I got seriously confused. Why? Because this ‘Last-Modified’ header is not something that is sent back all the time. I wasted a bunch of time trying to figure out if there is a way to request the information, but it doesn’t sound like it. If it’s there, great, if not, either make up your own timestamps or forget about it.

I managed to get back on track and even wrote up a nice little class for handling subscriptions when I found out the really bad part: My own website’s feed didn’t provide the data Ruby’s RSS parser expected. Great. I looked at a few others. It seems like RSS feeds are generally okay, but Atom feeds are all over the place. After fiddling around for a while, I made my code a little flexible and moved on.

I wrote a hideous shoes application.

Then I gave up, because I was tired of dealing with it. Maybe I’ll come back to it later.

However, I did change this site’s feed over to an RSS feed instead of Atom. If you were actually using the Atom feed, you can still do so, but the auto-discovery and link at the bottom are set to RSS.

I decided to merge this page and vice.presidentbeef.com. I managed to carefully squish the two databases together into something which made sense, so all the posts from there are now here.

Also, the look of the site has been updated slightly. I’ve added some convenient links to blog categories and even updated most of the tags in the archive. Probably a few more things will change along the way.

You know have the ability to share your thoughtful insights on my clever and informative blog posts. Of course, if you were reading them through Facebook that probably wasn’t really a huge concern in the first place…

I wasn’t really planning on adding comments any time soon, but I happened across this Disqus thing which manages comment systems for you. You can add it to any webpage (which is good, because how many people have heard of Ozimodo, much less attempt to support it?) and it takes care of pretty much everything. Kind of neat.

Yes, I am actually still working on this game. Today it received a fancy new URL, a faster loading logo, and set of fancy pantsy forums.

The game itself is still plodding along. Unfortunately, my ISP really limits incoming connections for some reason, so the game is pretty much inaccessible to anyone but myself. This is not really a bad thing, though, because there isn’t much to see anyway.

I have a new page on this site!

It’s a projects page!

It’s where you can see what I’m working on and stuff. It’s fun. Really.

I mean…there’s a bear.