the app that does so much that it consumes all available CPU, memory, network, and disk.

He goes on to say

It’s a reflection of the way that my relationship to the web has changed. I hardly use a standalone browser anymore — mostly for searching or printing. I don’t have time to go

Funny, I’m following this trend to opposite end of the curve. I’ve been noticing lately that I spend less and less time using anything other then my standalone browser, Firefox. Once I’ve got a decent coding environment built in, pretty much the only external apps will become ssh and chat. Functionally Firefox is very close to becoming my operating system. (though in practice I still prefer running it on platforms other then Windows)

While the news has been full of the problems with network based and centralized services (see Preshrunk or Schneier), their nativeness suggests that perhaps some of the problems Ted is seeing are an impedance mismatch.

And a quick, semi-related tip, if you’re setting up several people on FoF, consider setting up a shared cache directory to get some economies of scale.

http://minutillo.com/steve/weblog/2004/12/17/fof-0-1-9-is-debugged

The only ads in feeds I have recieved so far have been google adsense ads – and since I use Feed On Feeds and a userContent.css file that blocks those ads, I don’t see them anyway.

Among the many items piling up in my inbox, have been RSS/Magpie/RDF links. Here is a dump.

rss2jabber is a wicked cool script for sending out RSS updates over Jabber. Haven’t played with it extensively, but the possibles uses boggle the mind.

RSS-WML is a RSS feed viewer (aggregator) for WAP devices. Requires PHP, and MagpieRSS.

Jo wins the “making RDF accessible” award of late with Class::RDF, a CDBI based triplestore, and RDF::Simple. I think there must be something about England that encourages Perl coding, be it climate, or culture.

The “much anticipated” XML::RSS 1.05 should hit CPAN in the next few hours. There is also a chance it will be going to better caretaker soon. I just don’t have what it takes to drag this beast into the modern era. (but I’ll happily chatter on about what is wrong with it, if anyone cares)

In the Magpie coming soon (I promise, really) department, Steve’s character encoding patches, a patch from Glen Davies adding support for fetching RSS via authenticated proxies , improved documentation courtesy of firetrap, and an update of the recycle code to work with the latest and greatest FoF from Ernie Oporto.

http://www.reblog.org/

http://www.freshports.org/www/feedonfeeds/

Made a couple of tweaks to it last night to make it less of a diff from Feed on Feed 0.1.3, and now I’m releasing it onto an unsuspecting public, as a patch file, plus a couple of auxiliary files. Works just like FoF, except there is now a checkbox labeled ‘Recycle’. Any items you choose to recycle will be available in your re-published RSS feed (at http://example.org/<recycle-install>/rss.php).

There is a lot of room for improvement including better RSS feeds (they are pretty simple right now, and more suited for a headlines box, then full re-syndication), and support for conditional GETs.

You can see it the FoF interface and the RSS feed on my test server (though I just blew away the database so you’ll have to add some items)

My favorite feature is I’m using “submit in place” Javascript, meaning the page doesn’t have to refresh when you recycle an item. See the behindthescenes.js file, lifted largely from orkut.

http://minutillo.com/steve/weblog/2004/6/01/fof-0-1-3

http://www.reblog.org/

Temporary Solution

define('MAGPIEUSEGZIP', false);

Explanation

$results = substr($results, 10); $results = gzinflate($results);

Apparently this is changed in 4.3.2, and stripping the first 10 characters leads eventually (through a yet untraced path) to an out of memory error.

Next Steps

Update 6/25 2:16

Curiouser and Curiouser

And the news is good!

FeedOnFeeds: The Good News

FoF smoothly imported my OPML subscription list of my 85 most read sites with only 5 failures, one of which was clearly marked as an HTTP timeout.(a protest.net feed, whoops!) I was thrilled. I’ve been living in Straw’s parse-at-all-costs bunker, while I assumed the horrors of invalid, unparseable RSS ravaged the outside world. Imagine my surprise to peak my head up expecting Armageddon and to be greeted with flowers, sunshine, and a 4% failure rate. It gets better.

RSS: The Good News

Of the 85 feeds I read, all of them were parseable with an XML parser, none of them were invalid. I know we’ve got to comprise our ideals of perfection, deal with the fact that content producers can’t be trusted to produce valid XML, I accept that, and I’m willing to accept a 0% failure rate if you are

Magpie: The Pretty Good News

I knew it was out there, lurking, waiting to pounce. I first heard dark rumors of this feed last Fall; whispers in the street, seen it in the haunted, hunted looks in the faces of the parsers and aggregators around me, and finally one day, XML::RSS turned up on my door step, confused, and clearly in pain. You see it isn’t just an 80k behemoth of a feed, Kevin, quite legally, uses the XHTML namespace as the default namespace for his feed, instead of the RSS namespace we all expect. Having patched XML::RSS I knew someday I would be faced with the problem in Magpie, but up until this point I had cleverly managed to avoid ever facing the issue. (Damn you Steve for seducing me into this with your nifty web aggregator.) I’ve known for a long time Magpie’s innocent approach to namespace could never last, but I think I’ll let it enjoy its youth for a little while longer.

Addendums

• You could argue I stacked the deck a bit on the RSS failure rate, as yesterday I helped fix a broken that would have caused me problems today. But I like to think of that as a happy accident.
• Does your spell checker ask “FoF: Did you mean FOAF?”, mine does (admittedly not be default)

http://minutillo.com/steve/weblog/?p=338