Last night, while most crazy young people are out getting sorted for E’s and whizz, I decided to stay in and migrate the Exciting Hellebore Shew and Epistaxis Archives over to Wordpress. To my dismay it appears that the standard Wordpress RSS importer cannot handle enclosures, so there is no way to import a podcast series.
Rather than cut & paste seventy episodes of Epistaxis Time, I hacked up a new RSS2 importer based on the existing design, but using Magpie RSS to parse the RSS feeds. As a result we have a new parser that is more able to cope with the nuances of RSS2. You can download my code as a SVN diff here: http://svn.stodge.org/wordpress_rss2_import/magpie_rss2_import.diff
In order to make this work you will need a recentish version of Magpie RSS in a folder called ‘magpierss’ somewhere in your PHP search path. Just apply the diff at the root folder of your Wordpress installation. This works best if you got Wordpress via subversion… it’s much easier than downloading and unpacking tgz or zip files.
Working with PHP can be a bowel-churning experience; It is one of the most rubbish computer languages ever devised, because it encourages virtually every bad habit a developer could adopt. Its only saving grace is almost ubiquitous integration with Apache server, however there are plenty of other languages with similar levels of popularity.
Re-visiting PHP, I cannot believe that I ever found pleasure in making a living from coding this language. Were it not for the fact that Wordpress is a 100% PHP application I would never, ever go near it again. PHP, thy names are woe and misery.
Despite the aforementioned reservations, I have struggled against my profound fear of PHP to partially re-factor Marc Nozell’s ‘Yet Another Daily Delicious‘ plugin. In it’s original form, the plugin is capable of incorporating links added during the current day to a Wordpress blog.
I have added the following features:
- Tear support - you can limit the number of items that appear on the wordpress home-page. This means that if you go a bit crazy with adding your links, you can ensure that it does not ruin your layout.
- Deferred Publishing - You can make your daily links start off in a non-published state.
- Clickable Keywords - Takes you through to the correct tag page.
- Tidied-Up Layout - Arguably my version is slightly neater than Mark’s original.
My own code can be found on my Subversion, and is released under the same license as Mark’s original software in the hope that it will be of use to the blogging public. Enjoy and please feel free to publish patches against my subversion offering.
A month after we all agreed to standardise on Zope as our content management system, One of my clients (for some inexplicable reason), has decided to standardise on RHEL3 as the company-wide Linux platform. That would be just great were it not for the fact that no Red-Hat distribution ever (even Fedora) has ever supported any version of Zope, or endorses the use of the Python programming language for anything other than their own up2date rpm management utilities.