#xml

What is RSS?

I got an email from someone in relation to FeedBlendr, asking me what RSS really is, and what you’re supposed to do with it. He liked my reply so much that I thought I’d share it here for anyone else who’s having a bit of a tough time understanding all these acronyms (although admittedly I did use another one in my definition, but what the hey?);

“So basically RSS is a way for websites to make their content (normally time-based stuff like blog posts or news) available to people in a machine-readable format (a dialect of XML)”

Hope that helps someone (else) out there!

Personal Information Portal

As ‘buzzword’ as that sounds, that’s basically what I’m building for myself. It’s got an integrated bookmark manager, basic email features, news aggregation, calendar, file management, plus to-do list and sticky notes (via web-form or email thanks to the power of blosxom!).

It’s framed like crazy, but will include some cool DHTML tools and things to make it easier to use and more friendly. I’m basing as much as possible on XML/XSL as well, so that is proving to be interesting. I already have a basic version of the sticky notes and to-do list features working (ugly, but operational) and that’s using XML and XSL exclusively (coming from a blosxom backend!)

I hope to build it so that it’s easy to add new tools/features into it, and that it can provide a useful point for me to start whenever I get online, since it’ll be accessible from anywhere, and have access to most things I need!.

blosxxxom – it’s not porn

In amongst all the talk of the Atom API (which might one day actually be released and usable) and RSS, and with me working on some XML/XSL things at work, I realised that there’s probably another option entirely with blosxom as far as templates/flavours/themes goes, and it goes a little something like this;

Three Xs, therefore blosxxxom, that’s one for blosxom (Apple’s OSX), one for XML and one for XSL, which are the three technologies we’re dealing with here.

  1. Install the theme plugin for blosxom and get it working (this plugin makes life much easier!)
  2. Now create a new theme, with a suitable name (mine’s called ‘blosxxxom’ for the sake of the experiment, and it looks like this; page.blosxxxom. This theme should create a valid XML document from your posts.
  3. Your XML output should refer to an XSL stylesheet, which will actually take care of doing the formatting, entirely client-side (style.xsl in my example theme file)
  4. In the XSL file, just use normal XSL processing instructions to handle the output and presentation of the XML document into XHTML!
  5. Point your browser to blosxom and tell it to use the flavour name that you used to create this theme, and you should be able to see what the output looks like. View the source of the document and you should see the plain XML produced by blosxom 🙂

Now, for a couple notes;

  • I made my content_type value in the theme text/xml, but this forced blosxom to encode special characters to be nice for me. I found that it was better to comment this section of the main CGI out so that I could drop the values in, and wrap them in the CDATA tag seen in the XML theme.
  • Rather than worry about what’s in the body much, I just wrapped things in a <![CDATA[ tag ]]> to be safe.
  • Mozilla doesn’t currently display my output properly – it’s not doing links (or any tags) properly, and it’s just showing them rather than interpreting them as HTML. Anyone got any ideas on this one?
  • There’s more to be done, but it’s a fun point to start at, and there’s no reason why you can’t add things like a COMMENTS element to your STORY node, or a KARMA, a META node with a series of elements – it’s pretty free-form if you’re only doing the XML for your own presentation needs!

Hope that’s inspired some people to try some things out that they might not have otherwise tried, and if nothing else, it just demonstrates how flexible blosxom really is! 🙂