RSS Bandit

Paul Watson

Just a quickie: RSS Bandit[^] is an article on MSDN which has some interesting XML serialisation stuff you can use for RSS. I did something similar for Chris awhile back and it was relatively easy, serialisation is seriously cool. Not sure what Chris thinks but someone could easily serialise the CP webservices to RSS on their machine and then view it in a RSS reader.

Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South Africa

Macbeth muttered: I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er DavidW wrote: You are totally mad. Nice.

Taka Muraoka

Paul Watson wrote: Not sure what Chris thinks but someone could easily serialise the CP webservices to RSS on their machine and then view it in a RSS reader. Your wish is my command. It's already done! www.awasu.com[^] There are plugins for the Soapbox, fark.com, Joel on Software and It's Your Turn. It's pretty trivial to write more - I just haven't got around to it yet. A generic web scraper plugin is on the to-do list.

You should save yourself and your company years of grief by shooting yourself through the head immediately. Believe me, in the long run it'll turn out better for everyone. - Tyto (at arstechnica) Awasu 1.0[^]: A free RSS reader with support for Code Project.

Paul Watson

Taka Muraoka wrote: www.awasu.com[^] There are plugins for the Soapbox Cool thanks. But the CP bit is not working. I checked the webservice, and it is working fine, plus I checked my personal RSS feed for CP and it is working. I checked out that MyRSS and it seems quite cool, but the RSS feed it generated for CP did not work (tried all the versions except the SharePoint webparts one.)

Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South Africa

Macbeth muttered: I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er DavidW wrote: You are totally mad. Nice.

Taka Muraoka

Which CP bits? The CP plugin is not bundled with the standard install - I can send you a copy if you like. The Soapbox plugin is a Python script so you need to have Python and the WIN32 extensions installed. [edit] And yes, myrss is pretty cool although the results are fairly mixed. [/edit]

You should save yourself and your company years of grief by shooting yourself through the head immediately. Believe me, in the long run it'll turn out better for everyone. - Tyto (at arstechnica) Awasu 1.0[^]: A free RSS reader with support for Code Project.

Paul Watson

Taka Muraoka wrote: And yes, myrss is pretty cool although the results are fairly mixed. I wonder how it does it and what limitations it has. What I want to do actually is have a BizTalk like app that constructs XSL documents which take in a XML source and provides an RSS feed out the other end (or vice versa.) The main point is that the user has control over which nodes from the source document they want mapped to the neccesary RSS nodes. e.g. Take Title and Author from the LatestArticleBrief webservice and put them in the Title of the RSS doc. Then Description to Description, URL to Link etc. All with a visual interface, like BizTalk. This whole WebService to RSS through XSL makes a helluva good case for XML if you ask me. Fantastic stuff. Taka Muraoka wrote: The Soapbox plugin is a Python script so you need to have Python and the WIN32 extensions installed. LOL, I was going to ask how you managed to get the Soapbox messages seeing as they are not provided by the webservices. But no worries thanks.

Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South Africa

Macbeth muttered: I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er DavidW wrote: You are totally mad. Nice.

Paul Watson

Oh and thanks for the plugin via email, much appreciated. Cool stuff indeed. How do you do the WebService to RSS feed? XSL? .NET serialisation?

Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South Africa

Macbeth muttered: I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er DavidW wrote: You are totally mad. Nice.

Taka Muraoka

Paul Watson wrote: What I want to do actually is have a BizTalk like app that constructs XSL documents which take in a XML source and provides an RSS feed out the other end (or vice versa.) Cool! I will be adding XSL support to Awasu fairly soon to do exactly this kind of thing. Drop me a line if you want to chat about this a bit more. Paul Watson wrote: LOL, I was going to ask how you managed to get the Soapbox messages seeing as they are not provided by the webservices. Yeah, writing scripts to scrape a page is a bit clunky but it will do for now. I really want to add a generic scraper soon to make it easier for non-techies to get the feeds they want. myrss does an OK job sometimes but even when it does, the redirect page is really annoying. But the whole plugin thing is way cool, if I may so myself :-) We're pulling stuff out of databases and converting them into feeds, I want to write one to monitor SourceSafe, check if websites are up and response times, etc. RSS is so excellent :-)

You should save yourself and your company years of grief by shooting yourself through the head immediately. Believe me, in the long run it'll turn out better for everyone. - Tyto (at arstechnica) Awasu 1.0[^]: A free RSS reader with support for Code Project.

Taka Muraoka

Paul Watson wrote: How do you do the WebService to RSS feed? XSL? .NET serialisation? No, nothing that sexy, I'm afraid. The whole thing is written in C++ and I use Expat to pull apart the web service and convert it to RSS via code. As I said in my previous post, I want to add XSL support soon so all of this code will eventually be retired.

You should save yourself and your company years of grief by shooting yourself through the head immediately. Believe me, in the long run it'll turn out better for everyone. - Tyto (at arstechnica) Awasu 1.0[^]: A free RSS reader with support for Code Project.