Whoops, I forgot to mention my new little crufty news site, Linux Babble. It's only got two stories on so far: a bit about the XFree86 expulsion thing, and some stuff about the launch of Open Forum Europe's latest round of publicity. It is, though, the first site I've made that's got advertising on. It's just for the company I work for, and of course The Rockall Times, and a banner for a domain name registrar I got an affiliate thing with. So it's not exactly a slashdot yet, but it gives me somewhere to put ‘serious’ articles. I've got a few ideas for other things to write about there, but of course no time to write them.
I had to teach two days of Apache this week, which was a bit of a bummer, especially as it was all on Windows, and I know nothing about that. It was for a well-known company who are completely Microsoft based. It was like stepping into a strange parallel universe, where system administration means something completely different.
Since Aaron fixed The Register's RSS feed recently I've been thinking about using an RSS ‘aggregator’ to monitor interesting things. I've had an RSS feed for this blog for ages, but never quite worked out what to do with the things. Anyway, I think, in my copious free time, I'll knock up a simple web-based aggregator thing and bung it on http://aggregator.org.uk/, which I've just registered. It won't happen until I've got my new webserver set up because I'll want a daemon running to monitor the feeds. My basic plan is to have a ‘register yourself, get emailed a password, and log in’ scheme, and then allow users to pick RSS feeds from a list or add new ones. The list of predefined ones will be exactly the ones which other people are already monitoring, so that it will be automatically culled to only potentially interesting ones. Now that doesn't sound too hard, does it? I've already got some cookie-based session management code, and I expect there are Perl modules around for parsing RSS in a sensible way. I'll have to work out what to do about broken feeds, but I expect just marking them in the database as ‘didn't work last time’, and showing those up in red will be good enough for now.
Anyway, now to the Vic to listen to some Jazz. I haven't been to that for ages, but I've been told I have to go, and that sitting at home coding RSS aggregators isn't a good enough excuse not to…