award tour

I just discovered that a friend of mine is having a baby because he posted a sonograph photo of the baby on flickr which I just saw through an rss feed in google reader. i am now living life2.0.

any chance there’s someone who reads this who (a) uses google reader and (b) has had problems with it? My problem is that certain feeds don’t update for days and then randomly do a bulk update. My problematic feeds include 37signal’s Signal vs Noise and rss feeds from delicious (including 3rdparty). I haven’t seen a pattern to the problem. If I click on a feed which is displayed as “not updated”, I sometimes I will get updated posts and other times I won’t. This is annoying. Anyone have any ideas or solutions?

I recently started using yelp.com extensively because their google map search mashup is so damn handy. When I’m trying to find a place that I know is in a general area I find it’s the quickest way to find things. The reviews are usually pretty good too.

I started writing brief reviews on yelp and thought I should add it to awardtour. So you should now see a new section on the main page’s sidebar entitled “seattle reviews”. It shows my 3 latest reviews and the rating I gave the place. I initially thought that adding this should be pretty simple, “there must me a wordpress plugin to source an rss feed”. Well, there is but there were problems at every turn.

Fair warning, what follows is a very nerdy explanation of the problems I had. If you don’t know what xlst is or care about HTTP response codes, then you might want to stop reading and trust me when I say that it took more effort than need be.

I first tried out inlineRSS which is designed to take any rss feed and use an xslt to output it. I’ve never really used xlst before but, after trying to do just a few simple things, I hope I never do again. At this point, I can’t see why anyone would use xlst for anything. So I looked for another plugin and came across feedlist. After tweaking it a bit (for formatting mostly), I gave it a try and it failed miserably. It turns out that magpie, the php library that wordpress uses to retrieve rss, doesn’t handle HTTP 301 redirects. At this point I had spent about 4 hours working on something I thought would take 1 hour at most. So I googled my 301/magpie issue and found out that people had the same problem with ma.gnolia and that someone wrote a ma.gnolia specific wordpress plugin. It uses lastRSS instead of magpie and it thankfully handles 301s. So I downloaded this plugin and hacked in a few changes: pointed it to yelp, changed the formatting, and limited the description to 160 characters. This probably took 20 minutes. Et voila.

What’s foolish is that if I had just tried a simple integration test on the first 2 plugins I wouldn’t have wasted so many hours tinkering with them. This is foolish because this is one of the few facts of software development that I’ve learned in my job. Get an end-to-end test working first, then worry about the rest.

Anyways, I think I might clean this script up and add some formatting options like the Wordpress Get-Recent-Comments plugin (which is really well done) and put it out there for other wordpress+yelp users.

Google just launched an update to it’s google reader for reading rss feeds. I remember trying their first reader and it was straight-up terrible. This one is a huge improvement. Literally, these guys took all the things that annoy me about bloglines and fixed it.

First off, it marks articles as “read” once you scroll past them. In bloglines, it marks all the articles read as soon as you the page loads. So if you can’t finish the page, you have to go through the tedious exercise of marking each unread article as “unread” or marking them all “unread”. Next up, really good keyboard shortcuts. “j” for next story, “k” for previous story, and “v” to open the original story in a new tab.

My only real complaint is that there’s something I don’t like about the color scheme, but I don’t know what. I’m going to give this reader a try but I think I’ve found a successor to bloglines.