Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Project: Acta Diurna - Update 2

Things have gone well on the project over Easter. I managed to seperately prove all the concepts I needed to get things up and running (and learnt a lot about Ruby in the process). What were the elements? Well at the Ruby end it was the WEBrick server as mentioned before, plus the generation of an RSS feed (done using the simple-rss and Hpricot to grab and munge the HTML source pages) and some very simple threading (again done natively with Ruby). Where did I get the info? Why here and here...

I also had a HTML / Javascript page to complete the picture. This was made a lot simpler by Firebug which helped me struggle to remember my rusty Javascript skills. Again, I managed to take a very simple example and fiddle with it to get it to do what I needed - this time this was the source.

Now I need to parcel it all together and get it looking pretty. One thing I'm looking forward to using is Nifty Corners Cube. It'll make it look like it had a close encounter with a graphic designer in no time!

Finally, a question:
  • Why can't I use my own RSS reader? You can. But this solution is zero / minimal install, and is also managed by the project. It doesn't involve me as a user having to do anything I don't understand (i.e. not everyone knows what RSS is) or use elsewhere.




Powered by ScribeFire.

No comments: