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13 November 2014

Pumpkin Spice can now successfully monitor a feedless HTML page and turn changes into feed entries - retaining the full HTML formatting. It only pays attention to the text, not to the formatting, though if you bold something or otherwise break up text with HTML tags in the code, I think it'll treat that as a change.

To that end, I just subscribed it to all six-hundred-and-thirty-seven of us, with the exception of ~bw whose page redirects to a 404. PS won't (at this point) subscribe to nonexistent pages. All that means for now is that it cached a copy of everyone's front page, to compare to the next version when I tell it to poll. (Everyone except the half-dozen of us who have detectible XML feeds, that is.) Right now, it doesn't do anything with that data except dump it to STDOUT for debugging purposes.

But I could very trivially dump that to an RSS/Atom/JSON feed, either one for each user (basically a reinvention of Page2RSS) or one big huge sitewide group feed. I'll probably start building those, just because.

Eventually, of course, it will use that data internally, to present its feeds and feedlike things in the form a Facebook user might find familiar. Which strikes me as funny: I figured tilde pages made a good test set, but that also means that I'm, uh, kinda turning tilde.club into a social media network.

Probably my next step will be figuring out how to get my git repo up on Github. I've been faithfully committing my changes each night. (Or morning, really. My coder tendency to code late, sleep late does not work so well with my parent requirement to get up at 5:50am to get a kid ready for school.)

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