Blogspot ATOM in Feed-normalizer / Simple-RSS

Both Cragwag and Sybilline are using the excellent Feed-normalizer for parsing RSS and ATOM feeds, but there's been a niggling problem with the ATOM generated by Blogger / Blogspot in particular - the resulting links on each entry end up pointing to the comments, not the post itself.

So I just forked simple-rss at github and fixed this.

Turns out that simple-rss is just taking the first link tag that it comes across and using that as the link for a post, which in the case of Blogspot ATOM is the comments link.

On inspection of the ATOM RFC it says (section 4.2.7.2) :

atom:link elements MAY have a "rel" attribute that indicates the link relation type. If the "rel" attribute is not present, the link element MUST be interpreted as if the link relation type is "alternate".

Looking at the Blogspot ATOM, it looks like every element has a link rel="alternative" that points to the URL you would see if you navigated to the post from the blog homepage, so I've made it choose that link if it exists.

Github should build the gem automatically - but it's taking a long time to do it, so in the meantime, you can download it from http://github.com/aldavidson/simple-rss and build it locally:


gem uninstall simple-rss
cd (source root)
rake gem
cd pkg
gem install -l simple-rss


That should fix the problem

Introducing Cragwag.com!

You know those conversations you end up having in the pub, where after a couple of beers you end up saying "you know what there should be? There should be a site that does X" (where X can be anything at all)

I've had so many of those over the years, and never quite managed to work up the free time / motivation to actually get on and put the ideas into practice..... (and then what's tended to happen is that a couple of years later, someone else goes and does them and makes a fortune, but that's just sods law)

Well a few months ago, I decided enough was enough, and the next time I had one of those ideas, I should just stop talking about it and actually do it - so in my evening and weekends here and there, I've been noodling away on a couple of ideas, mainly just for my own amusement, and to keep me in the habit of actually following through on things.

So here's one of them - Cragwag - a climbing news aggregator.

Those of you who know me in person know that I'm a keen amateur climber. I'm under no illusions - I'm definitely in the "amateur" category for good reason :) - but it struck me that although there's a "definitive" go-to site for uk-centric climbing news ( UK Climbing.com ) it's still editorially filtered - an editor keeps himself up to date on everything that's going on in the scene, and then publishes what he thinks is significant.

That's all well and good, but typically what's significant is what's going on at the forefront of ability. I felt there was also a place for the (admittedly by-now-a-little-cliched) long tail of climbing-related blogs - unfiltered, un-edited, everybody's tales. Whether of heart-stopping epics in the Himalaya, or scrabbling up a Stanage slab. If you felt it enough to blog about it, then someone wants to hear about it.

Plus it was an experiment in automatic news tagging and cross-relating of posts based on content, so it was kind of techie fun too. Which is important :) I'd like to do something with a crowd-sourced google map and iphone gps too, but that's much more experimental. Need to learn the iPhone SDK first...

So that's Cragwag - all the climbing news from punters and pros alike. Just for fun, for the sake of an experiment, and - to paraphprase the most famous answer to "why?" of all time - because it wasn't there :) Yay!

Another day, another deployment

Posts have been increasingly thin on the ground recently, due to a couple of things: my discovery of a reasonable lightweight API client for Twitter, but mainly lack of time - which itself is down to two things:

1. I'm organising my wedding to the ludicrously lovely Lise, and
2. we've been getting SONAR installed and running at two large corporates recently (who shall remain nameless)

It's a good feeling to have seen a product go right through from initial idea on a post-it note to being installed at a super-huge financial client, and it makes all the work worthwhile when you see people actually using it to do their job. I wish I could talk more about the details, but confidentiality dictates not, sadly.

I've also been meaning to blog about the app I whipped up to manage the football team I organise - being a geek at heart, it's amazing the amount of time and effort I devote to being effectively lazy, and this little Rails app which started out as a quick time-saver ended up being a case study in the power of stupidity as applied to a linear optimisation problem - "given this set of players, each of whom have a set of positions they prefer to play in, what is the best possible line-up ?" I'll get round to blogging about that at some point, honest..

Another little personal project that I started as a tool for myself and then ended up generalising and meaning to add to whenever I get time (chortle) is Cragwag - an RSS aggregator, plus some - aggregating many various climbing-related blogs, an only-just-started map of climbing areas plus B&B's plus parking plus convenient deli's, which I may end up mashing up with weather reports to answer questions like "where should we go climbing this weekend?"

Bleh. So that's why I've ended up micro-blogging rather than macro-blogging these days. I will try to get used to writing in more than 140 characters again soon...