which add hooks for fixing the third "problem" mentioned earlier.
Assuming I haven't overlooked something completely obvious and stupid, I will post them later
tonight or in the morning.
Amphetathoughts #2 : It will be a cold day in Hell before it ships with XML::LibXML
but maybe, just maybe, it will someday ship using XML::SAX-iness for doing the heavy lifting.
Which is all really just another way of saying "Oh god, please make all this OPML stuff go away!"
OPML is fine for simple things but it just plain sucks rocks to read or write by hand and it uses
this weird-ass, easy-like-AppleScript, way of including and processing remote documents. It's not like
it would actually be hard to write a Perl thingy for munging "instant outlines" but why would I want
to when everything else has support for XInclude? And maybe I only want to include feeds on your blogroll
that start with the letter "B". At this point, two things should probably be pointed out: 1) I have
already written the code to process instant
OPML files and 2) I have even written an alternative to OPML which
suffers its very own set of problems and probably shouldn't be used for anything serious either.
Hello, my name is Aaron and I like the command-line. So, despite my general dislike for
aggregators I've got a copy of Amphetadesk installed on the laptop and I've been periodically
running it on localhost. Long story short is that waiting for the web server and the pages to
reload when adding feeds is just too long for me. So, my first thought was just to
muck with the 'myChannels' file by hand (read:XML::LibXML) and be done with it. But I figured
all these clever people had gone to the trouble of writing the damn thing so there
must be perfectly good methods for doing the same thing. This is what I've found out so far:
AmphetaDesk/Utilities.pm needs to be taught not to try and load GUI libraries when called from the command-line
Amphetadesk/Settings.pm needs to be taught to check for something like an
AMPHETAROOT environment variable rather than relying on Find::Bin (I'm certainly not going
to cd into my amphetadesk directory everytime I want to do something.)
The actual code that gets launched by Amphetadesk.pl needs to be taught to check the
'myChannels' file every (n) seconds and reload it once it changed. AmphetaDesk/MyChannels.pm loads channels into
a private %CHANNELS hash, so any changes I make now won't be noticed until the app itself
is restarted.
Keep in mind that these are all perfectly reasonable "problems" for an application that was
designed for use in a web browser. And please, don't anyone talk to me about trying to
use Amphetadesk in Lynx.
see also : brian d. foy: journals