From 4b6c0e31385f5f27a151088c0a2b614495c4e589 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Paul Duncan Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2021 12:47:50 -0400 Subject: initial commit, including theme --- .../posts/2004-10-25-new-raggle-engine-in-cvs.html | 56 ++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 56 insertions(+) create mode 100644 content/posts/2004-10-25-new-raggle-engine-in-cvs.html (limited to 'content/posts/2004-10-25-new-raggle-engine-in-cvs.html') diff --git a/content/posts/2004-10-25-new-raggle-engine-in-cvs.html b/content/posts/2004-10-25-new-raggle-engine-in-cvs.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c637093 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/posts/2004-10-25-new-raggle-engine-in-cvs.html @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +--- +date: "2004-10-25T02:29:48Z" +title: New Raggle Engine in CVS +--- + +

+What will probably become the new Raggle engine is now in CVS, under the module name squaggle. Here's what I've got so far: +

+ + + +

+I spent a bunch of time in the last month reading through as many RSS specs as could get my hands on. I read through the Atom spec as well. The three biggest problems users have had with Raggle are speed, memory use, and supported feeds. I'm attempting to address the speed issue in a couple of ways: by deferring as much of the internal searching and sorting to SQLite (aside: this also has a side benefit of dramatically simplifying the code, since all the funky array indexing, time conversions, ID hashing, etc goes away and becomes SQL queries :D). The memory use has also been addressed with a caveat (see my note above about the end-user interfaces and memory requirements). Paradoxically, the Ncurses interface may end up using more memory than the web interface, because the Ncurses interface has more speed and caching requirements than the web interface. As for proper feed support, that one is a little bit trickier. +

+ +

+Supporting RSS properly is actually +kind of a bitch, because there is no official standard (although there +are plenty +of specifications). Even worse, a lot of feeds play fast +an loose with requirements, so strict RSS parsers (like the undocumented one included with Ruby 1.8, or Chad Fowler's Ruby/RSS module) are nice +pieces of code, but useless for writing an RSS aggregator, in the same way that strict HTML parsers are useless for web browsers. +

+ +

+The way I dealt with this problem in previous versions of Raggle was to simply ignore the specs that +were out there and look for specific elements in feeds. This has worked +so well I'm going to keep doing it, with a twist. My goal with Squaggle +is to keep Raggle aware of as much of +the RSS spectrum as I can, but have the engine (Squaggle) only pay attention to what it absolutely has to. For example, if a feed has mixed RSS 0.92/1.0 elements, Raggle will parse it blindly and save what it can. +

+ +

+What I've got so far is available in CVS under the module squaggle. Play around with it and let me know what you think. +

+ -- cgit v1.2.3