FreePress Blog

Progress on the open source development front…

Well, I stayed up a little longer than I wanted to, but I wrapped up the coding for the initial release of the first part of my feed aggregator, and one that I think will be pretty popular on its own (outside my aggregator) as well.

Through the magic of XHTML and XSLT, I was able to put together a PHP page which will take the ATOM feed provided by the blogger software (for the posts only, no comments) and generate a RSS 2.0 feed of all the comments from all the posts listed in the ATOM feed.

For those of you who have no idea what I just said, the summary is that Blogger lets their users have a feed that people can use to check for new posts (and read them) without going to the site itself. Other blog software (like WordPress) also provides a feed for recent comments so that you don’t have to go through post by post on your favorite blogs to see if there’s any comments you haven’t read yet, and (until now) that wasn’t available for Blogger (that I know of).

Now I just want to test it out a bit more and then set up the server pages and make it available to the public.

It will, of course only work on Blogger accounts using the standard templates (like Jacquie’s and Kristi’s, which I’ve been testing it on), or at least ones that haven’t altered the defaults too much, which I think will be most people. Still out of luck for Nathan’s, but he’s moving to WordPress soon anyway.