Categories
Software and Programming

Silly XML hack, take 2

In a previous entry, I posted two tiny scripts for reading out a list of RSS subscriptions in an OPML file. One used regexps, and the other used the handy XML::Simple module.

Now, they both sort-of work OK, until they run into an OPML file that’s actually an outline (like the ones produced by SharpReader), where the XML::Simple script runs into a problem (the RegExp script, ironically, will probably print things OK, because it ignores the nesting and just parses whatever lines it sees).

So I did a few improvements, and here’s the result (available in plain text Perl, or SciTe syntax-highlighted HTML)

Categories
Science Fiction and Fantasy short

William Gibson’s blog winding down

William Gibson’s blog is winding down, according to an interview in Wired. “The watched pot never boils,” he says.

Categories
short Software and Programming

W3C RSS feed

The W3C RSS feed makes nice use of an XML style sheet. Now, if there was a way to make something an actual link with just CSS, it would be practically a webpage…

Categories
Blather

Explicitness is an act of violence

Esther Dyson and David Weinberger discuss the goodness of ambiguity in social contexts. The emphasis are mine this time:

ED: Ethics! Yes, it’s the most interesting question left [after technology, strategy, policy]. Without ambiguity, there is no free will.

DW: Explicitness is an act of violence. You think it’s archeological: You take something and dust it off, but in fact explicitness reduces things; it destroys. ….That’s why groups stay away from constitution writing.

ED: But they don’t stay away from constitution-writing. It’s more like moths to a flame. They can’t stop it. But they can’t handle the explicitness. It’s like pre-nuptial agreements.

Categories
Software and Programming

Magpie RSS

Magpie RSS is another RSS parser written in PHP.

I’m fiddling around with Onyx RSS as a possible replacement for what I’m using in feed (hmm, that page needs updating too…).

Too bad no one has written a proper OPML parser in PHP I can steal. All the ones I’ve found so far are pretty ad-hoc tools.