[CREATE] create planet

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 05:23:19PM +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
> Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >CREATE's planet seems to ignore <br/> from Inkscape's feed. Also, it
> >show sthe following news item from Inkscape's feed that is not visikle
> >at www.inkscape.org and contains no URL in the new body:
> 
> The Inkscape feed is pretty bad, is a homemade solution, a script which 
> read the webiste and generate the feed. In the process it strips *all* 
> html tags, BR, A, IMG, so the result is plain text, have a look at the 
> feed: http://inkscape.org/inkscape.rss, planet can't do anything more 
> with it.

It is not homemade any more than our previous system was homemade.  It
is a Perl module named XML::RSS::Simple.

> This solution was considered easier to use compared with the previous 
> Wordpress setup, which used to generate an usable feed.

The problem with wordpress was that even though we went through the
trouble of setting it up, reworking the website to fit it in, adding
user accounts, establishing templates, and so on, it got almost no use.
The Inkscape website had no news on it for most of a year.  Nice feeds
are useless if they have no news in them.

If that weren't enough, Wordpress was also slowing down our website
considerably, and broke the site on several cases.  In fact, these
problems were what motivated ripping it out, moreso than its suppression
of news writer activity.

Anyway, after it was removed, we examined what had gone wrong.  We seem
to have let the desires for having RSS feeds done a particular way cause
a major change in how the website news was done.  This change in process
killed submissions.  Everyone had thought the new system looked great;
it was just that no one actually used it.

To fix this issue, I returned us to a system closer to what we'd had
before; just simple writing html on the website.  News picked back up
almost immediately, and others began setting up translations into 4
other languages.

For our purposes, getting news on the site trumps having an RSS feed,
but I figured there must be a way to let people have both.  The
requirement that clearly existed was that the RSS feed mechanism MUST
NOT impact the news writers, and thus should be done as non-invasively
as possible.  RSS is a nice-to-have, but if it stifled news writers,
it's expendable.

Most RSS generating tools impose their own workflow on users.  However,
after searching and experimenting a bit with bloxsom, drupal, etc., I
found XML::RSS::Simple, which produces RSS from an HTML page.  It is
admittedly limited compared with other tools, and it's not been without
some bugs (mostly configuration errors on my part), but it has done the
trick: a) it never impacts news writers, b) I can fix it fairly easy
(assuming people email me when there's a problem - I don't use RSS
myself so don't notice if there are problems), and c) by its design it
will never slow down the main website or cause any instabilities.


Anyway, please feel free to complain and flame the current system, I'm
used to it by now.  ;-) I admit it's buggy and I don't catch issues as
quickly as RSS users would probably like, but it's lightweight and meets
our needs adequately.  If you really don't like it, then don't use it;
it just exists as a convenience for people who don't look at the
Inkscape website.  However, I'm happy to accept patches to fix the current
system, and will try to make time to look into bug reports if you email
them to me or the inkscape bug tracker.

Bryce