Aaron Johnson Now with 50% less caffeine!

deliciousposter 1.02 released and fun with html entities

I fixed a bug in deliciousposter that’s probably been wrecking havoc on anyone reading this site using an aggregator for a long time. You’re probably a nerd if you’re reading this post anyway, so I’ll bore you with the details. The deliciousposter project uses the delicious java library to get a list of posts [...]

The Data Life Cycle of a Blog Post

Cool flash infographic in the latest issue of Wired that shows what happens to your blog post after you click the ‘publish’ button (I’ll save you the hassle of actually viewing it: after you click the ‘publish’ button, exciting things like ping servers, data miners, search engines, text scrapers, aggregators, social bookmarking sites, online [...]

Debugging SOAP / XFire with ethereal

I’ve spent way more time than I should have the last couple weeks working to help migrate a website built against Jive Forums to run against a Clearspace X instance. As part of the migration, one of the things I did was to move all the data syndication that had been done with RSS and [...]

ROME and wfw namespace elements

I created a ROME parser and generator for wfw:comment and wfw:commentRss elements today. You can read all about it here and download the source code here.
Not sure what the wfw:comment or wfw:commentRss elements are for? Imagine you’re reading my blog in desktop aggregator and you want to post a comment to my blog. [...]

ROME and custom Generator elements

The majority of the articles I’ve seen on using ROME to create Atom and RSS feeds don’t show you how to customize the optional ‘generator’ element that both Atom and RSS support. It’s really easy. I’m assuming that you’ve already created and populated a SyndFeed instance:

SyndFeed feed = ..
WireFeedOutput feedOutput = new WireFeedOutput();
WireFeed wireFeed = [...]

RSS, Processing Instructions and Firefox 2.0

A couple weeks ago I posted an article that describes how you can use XML stylesheets with ROME to create RSS / Atom feeds that are ‘user friendly’ (like the ones that FeedBurner produces). Firefox 2.0, released just this past week, has a new feature which renders my article moot. The “Previewing and [...]

XSL / CSS Processing Instructions using ROME

Have you seen the way that the smart guys at FeedBurner display RSS feeds in a browser (here’s a sample if you haven’t)? If you’re like me, the first time you see a feed they manage, you’ll probably think that you’re viewing a page that contains a link to an RSS or ATOM feed, not [...]

JSON: Making Content Syndication easier

At work we’ve been having some discussions about sharing content between two websites: the natural first option was an XML solution, in this case RSS. Site A would subscribe to the RSS feeds of the site B, periodically retrieving the updated feeds, caching the contents of each feed for a specified period of [...]

FluentInterface

A couple of weeks ago on the DWR users list, in the context of needing to wire up DWR without using an XML file, Joe Walker pointed to a blog posting by Martin Fowler. In it, Martin discusses an interface style called a ‘fluent interface’. It’s a little difficult to describe in words (so check [...]

XML characters, smart quotes and Apache XML-RPC

I’ve been eating my own dogfood with the deliciousposter project (as you can see from my daily links). A couple days ago I posted a some links to del.icio.us and expected them to show up automatically the next day… except they didn’t. I traced it down to an errant smart quote that I copied [...]