08 Sep 2002
Sun, 08 Sep 2002
Distributing RSS with Jabber
Tonight, I implemented DJ Adams perl script for publishing RSS via Jabber. I think the article's been laying around for a while as the current versions of Net::Jabber don't quite work with the script. I figured I'd document my experience here in case anybody's interested in getting this working.
In order to get the script running solidly, the first thing I needed to do was comment out use strict; in /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/Net/Jabber.pm. The script kept exiting with an exception related to hashes not working with the strict option. Once I got past that, the next thing I ran into was that the sub handle_presence wasn't able to retrieve the presence of subscribed users properly. This is documented on DJ Adam's site (see the section titled The Fix); however, the code in the RSS publishing script is not updated to reflect this change in Net::Jabber. Thus, in the aforementioned handle_presence sub, you need to add a single line at the top of the sub shift; to eat the session id on the callback. Once I made these simple changes, everyting started working and I was able to see RSS updates as they happened from WinJab.
The potential here is enormous. I'm now only a few hacks away from integrating this into Movable Type such that RSS would be pushed via the Jabber server as god intended it. Considering that Movable Type, AmphetaDesk, and this Jabber RSS publish-subscribe script are all implemented in perl, the possibilities are endless.
Posted at: 22:09 | permalink
Steve Gillmor: Digital Rights Management and Blogging Editors
In an infoworld article that I found via Roland Tanglao, Steve Gillmor poses some interesting questions. hmm.Increasingly, the answer is in content creation. Attract the customer via the free, thin browser, but force them to thick Office to create, enhance, and distribute the content. Here's where Weblogs return to center stage. The Weblog architecture relies on the crippled IE edit control for its content creation tools, and it chokes off the virtuous cycle that is at the core of the Weblog tsunami.AFAICT, there's nothing stopping anybody from wiring openoffice to their favorite blog backend via the blogger API. That work doesn't look like it would take long either. I'd expect an experienced web services developer to pull it off in a weekend. Hmm...
How much more investment would it take to build a blogging editor on top of this stack, one free of DRM limitations? And who better to partner with than Apple, the last remaining engine of innovation? Jobs' Pixar studios leveraged Linux and p-to-p rendering farms to send Disney to the showers in the animation playoffs, after all.What I can't understand is why Steve seems to be moaning about the lack of a cross-browser HTML editor for blogging when the folks at q42 have had Xopus out for a while now. In a world that seems hell-bent on innovation, a lot of folks seem to be ignoring some of the most innovative work as of late. What's up with that?
Posted at: 10:28 | permalink
