14 June 2003
Two tools that I’ve written are ready for public consumption (I hope) now.
Pepperpot is basically a small, simple function to ping (notify of updates) three sites: Weblogs.Com, blo.gs, and BlogRolling. It requires AspTear and is not recommended if you can use XML-RPC to ping these sites instead.
Saltshaker is a collection of classes that simulate the structure of an
RDF/RSS
file. This means that, say, to say what your channel (or site) is called, you would do this: RSS.Channel = "My Weblogs". There’s an object reference available, so you can see what does what, and there’s also a demonstration file for you to play with.
In short: it generates valid RSS 1.0, easily.
There are a few geekisms I’d like to mention as well. For instance, I actually gave up on trying to fix the XSL troubles I had client-side, so no nicely-formatted stuff for now. There actually is a Stylesheet property of the RSS object, but I’m not supplying any sylesheets or help for it.
Also un-documented is support for mod_annotation, which lets you point to comments for an entry, I think. I’ve only just hacked it in now and I’m not entirely sure what’s going on: it might also be for a related entries-style feature.
Saltshaker generates RDF/RSS by manipulating the XML DOM. This makes sense because it makes it harder to output invalid XML and easier to noodle around with elements, attributes, and namespaces. If you have an XML tool like MSXML, why not use it? There’s no point in creating what’s potentially tag soup by typing in loads of angle brackets and then doing a search-and-replace when you can merrily scoot around the DOM using XPath.
Oh, and one more thing — the source as seen on the download page is actually what I use live on this site. Like CVS, only dumber.