4 posts tagged “atom”

One of the (often flagged) problems with the way things are done these days - web 2.0, if you must - is that people end up reliant on other people's services. You may not have noticed, but the front page of husk.org now takes content from this feed, along with various other places where I'm active online, and aggregates them into a single stream.

This has all been working fine, but sometime recently - on Friday, I think - Vox decided that their feeds would default to excerpt-only, and they've also added a bunch of invitation cruft ("Send to a friend", that sort of thing) to each entry. It was easy enough - once I noticed - to swap back to the full feed, but cutting out the extra lines of HTML is a bit trickier, although I'm sure I'll manage. (I'll try to take the opportunity to add a touch of styling I've been meaning to do for ages).

I'm slightly annoyed that none of this was mentioned in the Team Vox release notes entry, but there you go. (I don't like the proliferation of "share" buttons either, but Vox are obviously trying to be "easy to use", and Flickr's gone down that road too, with "email this page " and "save to delicious" links, so one day I'll just get used to it and stop kvetching.) I suppose what I really need, though, is a script that alerts me every time the feeds change, and - this would be cleverer - if they change format significantly. Sigh. More work.

We now return to your previously scheduled lack of content. Probably.

Getting the previous post out was more of a nightmare than I'd have thought.

I've started aggregating my Vox posts, delicious links and Flickr photos with my old MT install over at husk.org. Generally this has gone pretty well, but I hit a nasty edge case when I came to drag my post advocating not-SLRs out of draft hell. Originally I sketched the article's outline in November of last year, but I was able to use the Edit Date widget to pull it to the present, and once I'd finished it, it appeared in the right place on the Vox page.

(Actually, this was also an annoyance. To do so, I had to manually click through five months and find today's date. It'd be nice if there was a "today" link somewhere to make this process easier. If it could use the current time, too, that'd be even better.)

Unfortunately, when the time came to regenerate husk.org's front page from the Atom feed, it was nowhere to be seen. A bit of digging in XML and code later, and I realised that the issued property for the XML::Atom::Entry object was still set to November; the modified date was what had changed to today. A swift edit later and I was sorting on modified instead, but then any entry that had even a minor edit to i would move forward in time. Scratch that idea, then.

In the end the fix I decided on was to delete the original entry, and recreate it afresh, so that the issued date was today. However, it seems that this is what Vox should be doing: editing the date on the compose screen should modify the Atom issued property, not the modified one. It would certainly have saved me a bit of work.

For the last couple of months I've been sitting on a CGI script that would aggregate all my content for my personal site. Part of the reason is caching: the script doesn't have any, and it turns out that XML::Feed isn't Storable friendly, which knocks out my first approach.

So when I had a think about what Yahoo's Pipes promises, I thought it might be worth a look. I could get the service to do all the heavy lifting, hope they had a sensible caching policy (and if not, well, at least it was Someone Else's Problem), and then just format a single RSS feed locally.

Sadly, there's a major problem. The aforementioned XML::Feed Perl module does a wonderful job of hiding the mess of formats that labour under the acronym RSS and the name Atom. If you want to soft by date, you can do so easily.  (In fact, you get lovely Perl DateTime objects. I can't sing DateTime's praises enough, even if it does look daunting at first.) Pipes, however, doesn't. I can sort my Vox Atom feed by its pubDate property, or my delicious and husk RSS feeds by dc:date, but neither sort has a date format in common, so I can't sort them once they're output.

I had a quick look to see if there was an obvious way of doing a date transformation on an element of an item, but unless I'm missing something it's far from obvious. I could write a small web service and call it, but that's a lot of work, and I might as well do things locally if I'm that bothered. So I've given up, but not before writing this, because it seems like a natural thing to handle in such a high-level environment, and I'm surprised they don't.

On Monday evening, I was poking around with various APIs trying to configure Flickr to post photos to Vox. Now, the former claims to be able to post to the Atom API, and Vox claims to have one, but when I configured it and tried to test post I got an uninformative error.

Delving deeper, I broke out XML::Atom, the Perl library - originally by the CTO of Six Apart, now maintained by one of their technical folk - and tried a trivial test post, not unlike this example in Ben Hammersley's book. It didn't work either, with the somewhat baffling error "200 OK".

Doing more research, it seems that a lot of clients - Ecto, for example - have trouble with Vox. There is an internal Six Apart project for a Mac OS X based TypePad/Vox uploader, called Fence, but it's not finished, and doesn't work with 10.3. After a bit of headscratching, I decided I'd need to spend far more time than I have to figure out what was up, and left it.

This morning I discovered that Flickr have explicitly added Vox as a supported blog type. This just confirms to me that there's something odd about Vox's Atom API. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised by this: it's got nowhere near the adoption or longevity of the competing XML-RPC weblog APIs, and only a couple of months ago Anil Dash noted that it was still niche: "the Atom API hasn't gotten finalized in the way that feed format did" and "Atom will probably show up somewhat later in new tools using blogging APIs".

So, Team Vox, one thumb up for Flickr picture posting, since my earlier complaint about posting is now void, but one thumb waggling uncertainly, since the Atom API is obviously - to use the apparently industry standard term - "funky". Here's hoping it gets sorted out soon.