Author: harry

We are off up to see my sister in Norfolk in a couple of days time. It should be a good laugh. I have been trying to come up with a good way to bodge objects until we get them in IMCC. The best way I have found to date is name mangling but this is a pain in the ass. I have also considered containers but although easier to impliment it will not look much like objects by the time I’m finished.

I have been talking to Tim Bunce about a DBD Interface for Parrot and it would be extrememly nice to get one for the Parrot release in Feb. However, this is unlikely due to IMCC’s lack of objects. We could bodge it in the mean time and fix it later but fixing things is always ten times more difficulat than bodging them in the first place.

I have been playing with RSS for a few days and since most of the RSS that I have seen has been blogs I decided to RSS enable my plain old XHTML diary to a whizzy RSS compliant new fangled jobby. I have no other reason for doing this other than possible self promotion via my massively increased site traffic and “NOT”…..
I can hear people scream “use X or Y” do not write your own. What would be the fun in using someone else’s RSS generator. I had a look at some of the more noteworthy blogs and I noticed that there is an awful lot of commented out text in the source of the file. This seems to me to be a bit ignorant because I am paying for bandwidth and every bit counts ;-). I know thats a lame excuse but I could not help it nor could I think of a better one. To cut a long story short I used a very crude method to do it.
Using a couple of extra “span” tags I was able to come up with some compliant RSS from my blog. The joy of Perl.
The Script I used
The following script is quite rough around the ages but is gets the job done. If you have any questions about the Perl or why I just had to write my own feel free.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::Parser;
use URI::URL;
use XML::RSS;
use LWP::Simple;
my $base = “/hjackson”;
my $base_url = “http://www.hjackson.org”;
my $PAGES = {
“$base_url/cgi-bin/blog/december.html” => ‘htdocs/blog/december.xml’,
“$base_url/cgi-bin/blog/november.html” => ‘htdocs/blog/november.xml’,
“$base_url/cgi-bin/blog/october.html” => ‘htdocs/blog/october.xml’,
“$base_url/cgi-bin/blog/september.html” => ‘htdocs/blog/september.xml’,
};
my $STATE = { ‘intext’ => 0,
‘intitle’ => 0,
‘inlink’ => 0,
‘inspan’ => 0, };
my $RSS = { ‘link’ => “”,
‘title’ => “”,
‘description’ => “”, };
sub start_tag {
my ($self, $tag_name, $attr) = @_;
if( lc($tag_name) eq ‘span’) {
if( lc($attr->{class}) eq ‘blogtitle’) {
#print “In Span $tag_name\n”;
$STATE->{intitle} = 1;
}
if( lc($attr->{class}) eq ‘blogtext’) {
#print “In Span $tag_name\n”;
$STATE->{intext} = 1;
}
}
if( lc($tag_name) eq ‘a’ and $STATE->{intitle} eq ‘2’ ) {
#print “href = $attr->{href}\n”;
$STATE->{‘inlink’} = 1;
$RSS->{‘link’} = $attr->{href};
}
}
sub text {
my ($self, $text) = @_;
if ($STATE->{intitle} eq 1) {
#print “Title = $text\n”;
$RSS->{title} = $text;
$STATE->{intitle} = 2;
}
if ($STATE->{intitle} eq 2 and $STATE->{inlink} eq 1) {
$RSS->{title} = $text;
$STATE->{inlink} = 2;
}
if ($STATE->{intext} eq 1) {
#print “$text\n”;
$RSS->{description} = $text;
$STATE->{intext} = 2;
}
if ( ($STATE->{intitle} eq ‘2’) and ($STATE->{intext} eq ‘2’) and ($STATE->{inlink} eq ‘2’ )) {
\&create_rss();
}
}
sub end_tag{
my ($self, $tag_name, $attr) = @_;
if( lc($tag_name) eq ‘span’) {
if($STATE->{intitle}) {
}
if($STATE->{intext}) {
}
}
}
my $rss;
sub create_rss{
$rss->add_item(
‘title’ => “$RSS->{title}”,
‘link’ => “$RSS->{link}”,
description => “$RSS->{description}”,
);
$RSS->{‘title’} = “”;
$RSS->{‘link’} = “”;
$RSS->{‘description’} = “”;
$STATE->{intext} = 0;
$STATE->{intitle} = 0;
}
my ($html_page, $xml_page);
while ( ($html_page, $xml_page) = each %{ $PAGES } ) {
my $content = get($html_page);
#print “$html_page \n$content\n”;
$rss = new XML::RSS (version => ‘1.0’);
$rss->channel(
title => “Harry Jacksons Blog”,
‘link’ => “www.hjackson.org”,
description => “Just my Blog”,
dc => {
date => ‘2000-08-23T07:00+00:00’,
subject => “Harrys Blog”,
creator => ‘harry@hjackson.org’,
publisher => ‘harry@hjackson.org’,
rights => ‘Copyright 2003, Harry Jackson’,
language => ‘en-us’,
},
syn => {
updatePeriod => “hourly”,
updateFrequency => “1”,
updateBase => “1901-01-01T00:00+00:00”,
},
);
my @tags = (‘span’, ‘a’);
my $p = HTML::Parser->new(api_version => 3);
$p->report_tags( @tags );
$p->handler( start => \&start_tag, “self,tagname,attr”);
$p->handler( text => \&text , “self,text”);
$p->handler( end => \&end_tag , “self,tagname,attr”);
$p->parse($content) || die $!;
open ( FILE, “>$base/$xml_page”)
or die “Cannot open file $!\n”;
print FILE $rss->as_string;
close(FILE);
}