MagpieRSS with REX parser

MagpieRSS with REX parser

I'm trying to expand the verty useful MagpieRSS to also tolerate invalid RSS feeds. It's a common case that many feeds contain unescaped HTML tags, HTML entities and even nesting errors.
the expat based PHP native parser will chocke on such feeds, as they are not well-formed XML.

To make those feeds usable with a PHP based RSS-Reader, I'm now exerimenting with a REX shallow parsing technique I decribe here.

If this page looks funny or broken from time to time, that's bacause I'm exerimenting...

view the source here

currently ignoring the following Tags: <\/?(br|p|a|img|b|hr|font|i|cite|table|tr|td|ul|ol|dl|dt|dd|li|blockquote|em|strong)(\s+|>|\/)
Traumwind (no HTML encoding) (xml)
channel:
* MadeByMark.com: Tales of the Sloppy God
* MadeByMark.com: Tales of the Sloppy God
Yet one of the most memorable images of Katrina's destruction was that of a ruined shell of a Baptist church. I'll bet more Baptists than casino workers were impacted by the storm. Did God wipe that church out for a reason? Is the destruction of that church building a sign that God wants Baptists to leave the Gulf Coast?
Happy birthday, Hal!
Happy birthday, Hal!
Hal is 50. All the best!
mSpace
mSpace
mSpace is an interaction model to help explore relationships in information.

mSpace helps people build knowledge from exploring those relationships. mSpace does this by offering several powerful tools for organizing an information space to suit a person's interest: slicing, sorting, swapping, infoViews and preview cues.

Sounds a lot like what I was going on all the time. New ways to learn about things. What to do if you don't yet know what you are looking for. All that. Awesome.

Somehow things went by unnoticed
Somehow things went by unnoticed
For all I know, the blogosphere is unpredictable. I would have thought a title like 'Collaborative filtering - almost for free' might aquire some links and some critical discussion. Well, maybe no one has seen it yet? Or maybe my writing is so bad, no one bothers commenting? Nah, bloggers would come pick on me if it was bad. Maybe it's too good? And people want to keep it for themselves?

What ever. Here's my shameless plug for it anyway.

Why do things get messy?
Why do things get messy?
In my current project - building a collaborative filtering dunction based on user-clicktracks - I had a nice, simple and clean proof-of-concept code-base. Now two things happened: I switched to data-storage in a /My)SQL DB, and added some client wamted features. And all of a sudden I am faced with a pile of stinking code-spagetti... No it's not really that bad, but my own tastes are such that I really dislike what I'm surrently coding together. I desperatly want to reduce the complexety again, but am 'struggeling' to get the basic unctionality working... I guess I need to come back later and see if this can be cleaned up. I hope I find the time for that. My motto isn't just a motto afer all: "-- traumwind: making complex things simple --"

[update] after writing this done and walking the dog, I sat back down and suddently noticed that a lot of the muddle in the code was due to a unhappy choice of when to do what. Changing things around only slightly cleared up a lot of the confusing code flow. And funnily this clearer code now uses almost the exact same lines of code, only arranged in another sequence...

Looking back I see that my my confuddled code reflected my confuddled state of mind on that day. So now I hvae a nice piece of code, but the feeling of unease still lingers, although it's not any longer grounded in reality. I was preparing for some very hard thinking and problem solving when a simple change of sequence was all that was needed. But somehow my mind is still geared up for that 'dreaded task'...

I want this book
I want this book
DHTML Utopia
SBELT3 status
SBELT3 status
today I sent a first beta tar-ball o a brave person. Things have gone very differently from when I first announced I was working on a public version of my blogging engine.
swarmbildende Micro Hubschrauber
swarmbildende Micro Hubschrauber
The Flying Gridswarm, and the UltraSwarm
These two projects are exploring ways of getting a group of small aircraft to fly like a flock of birds, while at the same time performing non-trivial task-related distributed computation across a wireless network. 
what a nice birthday present
what a nice birthday present
In the night of 15/16th of may, our ISP had a nice b-day present for me. They closed down this server due to an unpaid bill. Problem is they can shut you down on a holiday, but you can only contact the people in charge on workdays. So I could only get service back today, first thing in the morning.
Birtday is done, still living
Birtday is done, still living
Ok, now I'm officially a grex-haired old man. '35 jahr, graues Haar'. And I can show the grey hair to anyone interested!
Thatnks for the birthday wishes, I'm sure I will be missing some on the web, so I decided not to link... I'm still in an un-blogging state of affairs, my tracking of the blogosphere is very poor these days. But it shure feels nice to see some old friends remember your birthday even if you don't really had any contact for some while!
forget the 14th of May
forget the 14th of May
It's a date by far over-rated. Especially the 14th May of 2005. Only thing significant on this day might be the fact that it's my 35 birthday and no one seems to have time for a celebration. Oh well, as I said, just forget the date *LOL*
Flash MX w/o using an IDE
Flash MX w/o using an IDE
I hate Flash MX's as an developement environment. I love Flash (swf) as a technology. I was long searching for a way to do Flash w/o using Flash.
All that time it was right in front of me. Enter swftools. Take a close look at swfc. It takes some getting used to, and debugging ActionScript is a little painfull w/o the IDE, but it shure beats digging around in an awfull GUI app, trying to remember where the heck that menu-item was... scripting, baby!
A spotlight for your mouse-pointer
A spotlight for your mouse-pointer
So someone actually went and did what I wanted to have for so long: Mouseposé. A spotlight like zone that follows the mouse ointer, to easily find it or focus peoples attention to where it is pointing.
hire me!
hire me!
Not posting here means I'm busy trying to land my first project(s) on RentACoder.com So far it's looking good in at least one instance. But project hunting does eat time...

You can find me under... tada traumwind, who'd have guessed?

elance.com vs. RentACoder
elance.com vs. RentACoder
spurred by a post by Seth Godin, I registered at elance.com. It's free. But just now I wanted to bid for a project I'd love to work on to notice that I need to give them minimum $30 a month to even bid!

RentACoder looks nicer in that aspect:

To pay for this service, Rent a Coder charges coders a 15% Rent a Coder Fee on the profit from work and questions. So if you don't find work...we don't get paid.

Also the RentACoder website looks far more informative and helpfull. I found an answer to my question riight away, while on elance.com I needed to actually try to bid to be sure how it would work and what it would cost. Oh, the info is there too. But buried and confusing...

elance.com only takes 8.5% from your earnings... but they have this basic fee... [thx to Rick and Feedster]

The SBELT Blog engine
The SBELT Blog engine
pre-announcement: I'm in the process of cleaning up the SBELT code that drives this weblog for a public release. Licence will be something liberal like the MIT/BSD style ones.

SBELT is a blog-engine written in PHP (4/5) that is file-system based (no MySQL etc) and has all the basic features I need(ed). Watch this place for a release soon!

ein bisserl Werbung
ein bisserl Werbung
Veronica Schwandt hat einige interessante Dinge zum Thema Gesundheitsberater, psychologische Berater, gesundes Leben, Naturfasern, Naturprodukte, Jakobsweg

mal sehen wie lange Google diesmal braucht um die Seite zu aktualisieren...

merging my feeds
merging my feeds
It seems I'm getting a few things done finally. One was to merge all my new blogs into one feed for my subscribers convenience. So now if you subscribe to this blogs feed, you will also be updated on Tindertraum and Such-Gedanken... I'm not sure if I will do this in the HTML version also. My main goal is to get the word about my new blogs out to existing subscriber, not to duplicate content here.
Traumwind Such-Gedanken
Traumwind Such-Gedanken
public snnouncement: I have startede my German-speaking weblog on search engine stuff over here

öffentlich Durchsage: mein 'Such-Gedanken Weblog ist ganz neu und auf Deutsch...

Ich arbeite zur Zeit an einer Serie von Vorträgen und Seminaren mit dem Arbeitstitel 'Suchmaschinen für Seitenbetreiber'.

Ich möchte dieses Weblog hier nutzen um Gedanken und Konzepte zu erproben und für alle sichtbar zu erarbeiten.

Dem Medium Weblog entsprechend können Einträge daher jede Form von kurzen Notizen bis hin zu ausgearbeiteten Artikeln haben.

two things a weblog needs
two things a weblog needs
there's two things a weblog needs that my current setup lacks:
  • referrer statistics - who links to me? Who's talking about me? And no, I don't think Trackback or Pingback etc are essential...
  • possibility of direct Feedback - well, comments sort of. Only due to comments spam etc I won't be doing that again. I'm thinking about a simple (email) feedback form on the bottom of each page. Sends a simple email to me with the page(title) in the subject. That is non-public, moderateet comments...

alles Bild, Text und Tonmaterial ist © Martin Spernau, Verwendung und Reproduktion erfordert die Zustimmung des Authors