Category Archives: rss

RSS enclosures -revisited

I studied RSS in detail a while back for Aggreg8 and for my Content Syndication presentation (also on Google Base). I’ve only just now revisted the spec and was quite taken aback that there is only one enclosure allowed per RSS item. Quite a limitation considering the wealth of media (images,videos,audio) being published and syndicated these days. There was talk about changing this in a future version or extending RSS 2.0 (using namespaces) or using mediarss but nothing seems to have made it back into the official RSS spec – or have I missed something?. Atom allows as many as you want using the atom:link element.

Extend Your Browser

Tuesday 6th (the day of my presentation) eventually rolled around. Due to a crazy machine rebuild and re-install fest, I only finished writing the presentation at 1:30pm on the day. It went really well, some very good questions at the end. As I mentioned in my previous entry – the description of the presentation was –

Firefox and the Gecko family of browsers are not simply web browsers, they can be extended to provide custom functionality, and used as platforms for building standalone applications. During the presentation I will discuss the anatomy of the Gecko engine and the Firefox browser, extensions and how to create an extension for the Firefox 2.0 browser using Aggreg8 (http://aggreg8.mozdev.org ) as an example.

Philip is a 2003 Software Engineering graduate of Dublin City University. He has been working at Karova Ltd for two years, on ecommerce and custom web applications, and now holds the position of Senior Developer. Outside the office, he hacks on Firefox extensions and small Python or Perl based open source projects. He loves C#, XSLT, Python, MySQL, WxPython, SVG, XUL, Gecko, Javascript, RSS, CSS, his Labrador puppy, Ubuntu and Mono.

You can now download my preentation-

In MP3 audio format – (no pen clicking this time 🙂 )
ITWalesExtendingYourBrowserPhilipRoche.MP3 [mp3 31 MB – 1 hour 2 minutes]
PDF of my presentation slides
ExtendingYourBrowser-Slides.pdf [pdf 501 KB]
PDF of my presentation slides – including my notes
ExtendingYourBrowser-Notes.pdf [pdf 548 KB]

Enjoy

Extend your browser – ITWales

Snippet from Extend your browserLast year I gave a presentation to the ITWales group on Content Syndication. I have been bullied into giving another presentation next Tuesday. I have entitled it “Extending your browser”. Directly from the flyer –

Firefox and the Gecko family of browsers are not simply web browsers, they can be extended to provide custom functionality, and used as platforms for building standalone applications. During the presentation I will discuss the anatomy of the Gecko engine and the Firefox browser, extensions and how to create an extension for the Firefox 2.0 browser using Aggreg8 (http://aggreg8.mozdev.org ) as an example.

Philip is a 2003 Software Engineering graduate of Dublin City University. He has been working at Karova Ltd for two years, on ecommerce and custom web applications, and now holds the position of Senior Developer. Outside the office, he hacks on Firefox extensions and small Python or Perl based open source projects. He loves C#, XSLT, Python, MySQL, WxPython, SVG, XUL, Gecko, Javascript, RSS, CSS, his Labrador puppy, Ubuntu and Mono.

You can also download a PDF version of the flyer. I’m even half way through writing the presentation so this weekend will be a busy one. Once I’m done, I’ll upload the PDFs of the presentation.

Aggreg8 lives

This weekend I have gone on an all out Open Source offensive. I have released a new version of ACR (Automatically Create Rewriterules) with some bug fixes and faster processing of sites. I have released an updated version of PEA (Photoshop Elements Album Export) with improved accessibility and more options in the python script header.

Aggreg8 lives again I also started work on Aggreg8 again. I have a working version for Firefox 2.0 (not released yet) which will be my basis for my future plans.

  • Get Aggreg8 working on Firefox 2.0 – Done but not released
  • Get auto-subscribe working – Done but not released
  • Use built in Feed parser
  • Use SQLite for storage
  • Have an options panel
  • Ability to import and export OPML
  • Clean up XULs and Javascripts – especially the location of some functions
  • Add license to header of each file (MPL)
  • Create some nicer CSS stylesheets
  • Create a Norwegian language file
  • Change all references of Aggreg8.net (now a microsoft portal) to Aggreg8.org
  • Implement some sort of caching (although the aim of Aggreg8 is to be simple – caching might be overkill)

After 3 years of inactivity on the aggreg8.mozdev.org site. I am again on the active projects list and am raring to go with the above features. The aim of Aggreg8 version 0.3 is to be a super simple RSS reader with no fancy feature, just an easy way to read your RSS feeds. Using SQLite and the built in parser, I hope will improve performance too.