http://laughingmeme.org/2007/02/15/it%e2%80%99s-not-you-it%e2%80%99s-me/ Just another WordPress weblog Fri, 18 May 2012 17:48:27 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://laughingmeme.org/2007/02/15/it%e2%80%99s-not-you-it%e2%80%99s-me/comment-page-1/#comment-10039 Risukun Thu, 15 Feb 2007 12:51:20 +0000 http://laughingmeme.org/2007/02/15/it%e2%80%99s-not-you-it%e2%80%99s-me/#comment-10039 <p>I just gave it a try to do a fairly simple task: combine 4 RSS/RDF feeds from 3 different sites into one. However, there don't seem to be sufficient operators for very common schema transformation tasks (i.e. combining RSS & RDF feeds), like renaming fields (publication -> pubDate) or converting date strings within feeds. I also discovered, to my horror, that pubDate was being sorted <em>as a string</em>, which completely fails for the typical (stupid) date formats that don't start with YYYY-MM-DD (the Japanese get this right and I switched to this for file naming purposes years ago). The strange thing is the there is a seperate date format widget, but no obvious way to use it to convert fields within an RSS feed... Foreach:Annotate seemed a likely candidate, but it doesn't seem to support a nested date conversion block. The bizarre part is that they have some random advanced operations (translation, analysis, location extraction), but are missing some very basic ones and/or appropriate conversion operators for common tasks. I also encountered a couple of error dialogs (the very first operator I tried to add failed). Cute interface, largely broken functionality for some common use cases (i.e. combining feeds).</p> I just gave it a try to do a fairly simple task: combine 4 RSS/RDF feeds from 3 different sites into one. However, there don’t seem to be sufficient operators for very common schema transformation tasks (i.e. combining RSS & RDF feeds), like renaming fields (publication -> pubDate) or converting date strings within feeds. I also discovered, to my horror, that pubDate was being sorted as a string, which completely fails for the typical (stupid) date formats that don’t start with YYYY-MM-DD (the Japanese get this right and I switched to this for file naming purposes years ago). The strange thing is the there is a seperate date format widget, but no obvious way to use it to convert fields within an RSS feed… Foreach:Annotate seemed a likely candidate, but it doesn’t seem to support a nested date conversion block. The bizarre part is that they have some random advanced operations (translation, analysis, location extraction), but are missing some very basic ones and/or appropriate conversion operators for common tasks. I also encountered a couple of error dialogs (the very first operator I tried to add failed). Cute interface, largely broken functionality for some common use cases (i.e. combining feeds).

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