4-26-03 RSS Feed up
This morning I got inspired to try to set up the RSS feed for this web log.
After resurrecting my Zope knowledge and thrashing about a bit, I believe I have
something that works, that you can see links to on all weblog pages (please let
me know if it doesn't work for you; I'm new at RSS so it's likely that I got something wrong).
As usual, the Zope solution (once I figured it out) was simple and elegant. The static
stuff was placed in a DTML document that looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Thinking About Computing</title>
<link>http://www.MindView.net/WebLog/</link>
<description>Bruce Eckel's Web Log</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<generator>MindView WeblogRSS.py v1.0</generator>
<copyright>Copyright 2003 MindView, Inc</copyright>
<dtml-var RSSbody>
</channel>
</rss>
The dynamically-generated part was created by
the following Zope extension (called by RSSbody):
def RSSFile(self):
list = []
for f in self.objectValues(): # Could use a list comprehension to do this!
if f.getId().startswith("log-"):
list.append((f.getId(), f))
list.sort()
list.reverse()
rss = ""
for id, f in list[:8]: # Only use the most recent 8 entries
rss = rss + "<item>\n"
rss = rss + "<title>" + f.title.split(' ', 1)[1] + "</title>\n"
rss = rss + "<pubDate>" + f.title.split(' ', 1)[0] + "</pubDate>\n"
rss = rss + "<link>" + f.absolute_url() + "</link>\n"
# Remove first and last lines:
body = "\n".join(f.document_src().split("\n")[1:-1])
body = body.replace('&', '&')
body = body.replace('<', '<')
body = body.replace('>', '>')
rss = rss + "<description>\n" + body + "\n</description>\n"
rss = rss + "</item>\n"
return rss
Since I don't program Zope extensions every day, it took some research (mostly
of my own code) to remember how to do this. But every time I use Zope, I believe
I'm much more productive than if I were to use any of the non-Python alternatives
(I suppose that's what keeps all of us stuck in whatever technology we're stuck in
-- the believe that we're more productive with that, and that changing would involve
more effort and uncertainty than it would be worth).
The next step will be to create the system that will allow me to email the weblogs in
(using the same approach as described in previous weblogs for maintaining the FAQ).
