When in doubt, code

12 November 2014

It's maybe not the best policy, but like I've said elsewhere, I was raised by wolves. I can do a lot of brainstorming before settling into coding, but sometimes I just have to start laying out the Perl (or whatever, but in this case it's Perl) and seeing what happens. I may not end up with the grandiose (silo buster)[http://tilde.club/~silver/blog/silo-buster.html] I've talked about, but at the least I'll have a critter that can build Atom change feeds off Facebook and Twitter and vanilla HTML pages, which will improve my Tiny Tiny RSS life.

So that's what I did. It's been an embarrassingly long time since I've done any major coding in Perl, especially building modules from scratch, so I dinked around until I remembered how those work. I threw together a skeletal library for (Pumpkin Spice)[http://tilde.club/~silver/projects/pumpkin_spice.html] and started hanging plugins off it: Spice::HTML for those pages that just don't have any other structure, then Spice::Feed for those that have an Atom or RSS feed. My test suite used my own tilde page, and XML::Feed barfed all over my Atom feed.

I kind of knew that the evolving nature of my formatting here had maybe introduced some invalid markup here and there, but that was just comical: https://twitter.com/gamehawk/status/532395685824327680 and that's just one screenful.

So I stopped doing Atom with HTML::Template and built it with XML::Feed like I should have all along. To no one's surprise, XML::Feed then parsed it with no trouble. To those of you who've subscribed and now are suddenly getting all my back posts now that it's, you know, actually feed-able, I apologize.

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