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June 6, 2006

Planet Musings

Thanks to Sam’s hard work, adding Atom support and MathML support and … to Planet, I decided it was finally time to give it a whirl. Installation was a breeze1, a few tweaks to the templates, and … the most tedious part was copying the feed URLs I wanted to syndicate into config.ini.

Introducing my very own Physics-oriented “river of news”: Planet Musings. If you’d rather view it in your feedreader, there’s an atom feed, too.

Meanwhile, I quietly released a couple of bugfix revisions to itex2MML, which is now at version 1.1.3.2.

1 Well, almost a breeze. Installing bzr so that I could pull incremental updates from Sam’s development tree seemed easy enough.

fink install bzr-py24  bzr-py24-bin

prompted me about a slew of prerequisites, which Fink seemlessly compiled and installed. Trouble was, it didn’t seem to consider pycurl to be a prequisite, which prevented bzr from having any success contacting Sam’s site. After much head-scratching,

fink install pycurl-py24

did the trick.

Posted by distler at June 6, 2006 9:28 PM

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8 Comments & 1 Trackback

Read the post Planet Musings
Weblog: Sam Ruby
Excerpt: I like environments where contributions are cumulative. The Universal Feed Parser does a fair amount of data cleansing. BeautifulSoup does quite a bit more. All I had left to do was solve the “last mile” problem. And Planet pulls it al
Tracked: June 6, 2006 10:13 PM

Re: Planet Musings

I’ve started to rough in some code that could make adding new feeds a matter of a few mouse clicks — complete with authentication and access control.

config.ini could also contain overriddes to say such things as “ignore what Tommaso Dorigo’s feed says, and treat atom:summaries in that feed as text/html”.

As I hinted on my weblog, BeautifulSoup can do much more than simply convert TagGoop into well-formed XHTML. Transforming the content is also possible. Imagine some of the following:

  • Add style="float:right;" to images from Cosmic Variance that contain class="alignright".
  • Change color: rgb(255, 255, 51) to background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51) in style attributes found in Urbano Franca entries.
  • Change all instances of “hell” to “heck” in Musings.

If any of these strike your fancy or trigger new ideas, let me know.

Posted by: Sam Ruby on June 7, 2006 7:42 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Planet Musings

config.ini could also contain overriddes to say such things as “ignore what Tommaso Dorigo’s feed says, and treat atom:summaries in that feed as text/html”.

That would be cooler than what I did (switch to his RSS 2.0 feed, and let the UFP figure out what the heck his description is written in).

Add style="float:right;" to images from Cosmic Variance that contain class="alignright".

That’s more properly done in the “Accommodations” section of the CSS stylesheet (as you’ve done on Planet-Intertwingly).

But it would be nice to change align="left" in Gordon Watts’s feed to style="float:left" (and similarly with the border attribute in Dorigo’s and others’ feeds.

Change color: rgb(255, 255, 51) to background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51) in style attributes found in Urbano Franca entries.

Something like that would be nice (though I think the intention is to make the Portuguese version of Urbano’s posts hard to read :-).

Change all instances of “hell” to “heck” in Musings.

He’s so foul-mouthed; we definitely need something like that …

Posted by: Jacques Distler on June 7, 2006 11:15 AM | Permalink | PGP Sig | Reply to this

Re: Planet Musings

I’m testing a fix which enables the config.ini to override the text type metadata for specific feeds. If you would like to play with this, pick up my latest and take a look at the Steve Loughram entry in my config.ini for usage.

Posted by: Sam Ruby on June 9, 2006 1:18 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Planet Musings

Wow! Nice work, Jacques!

Posted by: Robert McNees on June 7, 2006 11:11 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Aw shucks…

All credit goes to Sam (and Mark and Jeff and Leonard and the other contributors to those projects).

My contribution consisted of badgering Sam. And then downloading some software, tweaking a few templates and typing in a bunch of URLs.

Not, as they say, exactly rocket science.

It should be noted that the benefits of adding MathML support to the Universal Feed Parser spill over (eventually) to all the feed aggregators that use it. Which was the subject of another post of mine.

[Also, a note to anyone tempted to start their own Planet-*. Since I’m automatically pulling software updates from Sam’s site, and executing the code on my machine, it’s important that the whole thing run under a unique non-privileged user-ID, so that whatever damage might occur is limited to the Planet-Musings subdirectories.]

Posted by: Jacques Distler on June 7, 2006 12:18 PM | Permalink | PGP Sig | Reply to this

Re: Planet Musings

Jacques,

recently Planet Musings exhibits the following behavior: If somebody posts a new blog entry (like I just did), P.M. re-lists several previous posts, although no update has been made to those old posts.

Posted by: wolfgang on November 12, 2006 5:09 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Planet Musings

Hmmm. Seems to be a problem between Venus and Blogger. I’m investigating …

Posted by: Jacques Distler on November 12, 2006 6:43 PM | Permalink | PGP Sig | Reply to this

Re: Planet Musings

Jacques,

I recently deleted my blog and somebody else has quickly taken the address.
Please delete my name from Planet Musings.

Thank you.

Posted by: wolfgang on December 7, 2006 6:37 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

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