Hunting The Muse

I did a bit

I did a bit more RSS research tonight. I am mostly focusing on Peerkat. It seems to have most of what I want - my two biggest criticisms of it were that it didn't support all versions of RSS, and that it was tedious adding new fields. However, I found a couple of things to temper that.

By default, Peerkat only supports RSS 1.0 . In a bizarre situation, however, development of the 0.9x line of RSS seems to continue even after 1.0 was solidified. Since 1.0 isn't backwards compatible to 0.9x, it means that readers have to support both lines.

RSS 0.9x is really up to about 0.94 now, at least if you want to be bleeding edge. Dave's feed is 0.94 right now. There's been a semi-aborted attempt at 0.93, but most Radio Userland feeds are 0.92 right now, including Matt's and Peter's.

So it's a roadblock. However, Peerkat depends on something called Orchard, and while the default installation of Peerkat only supports 1.0, a newer version of Orchard-Python evidently supports 0.9x .

Secondly, there is a nifty Peerkat Utility that could let me easily subscribe to a Radio Userland feed without having the type the information in.

If it all works, I've got the makings of a system that I want - the ability to pull in multiple links, the ability to categorize them, delete them, and send them on to my own aggregated RSS feed. I can write a cron script to publish it to my website so others can read it. It's pretty close to what I wrote about last week. It looks like a lot of people were already (mostly) doing what I mused about, but obviously it still isn't as easy as it could be...

Case in point: there's one last problem for me - while, after installing the Orchard upgrade, I can get Peerkat to work with 0.91 feeds, I just can't yet seem to get it to work with 0.92 feeds, which includes almost all of the Radio Userland blog feeds. I have a posting in to the mailing list to see if I'm doing something wrong. I'll follow up here later with the results. Posted by Curt at June 9, 2002 02:39 AM