Feed to Hud
This morning I was greeted by an empty feeds page. Turns out is has been permanently ‘deprecated’. Merde. So, since it’s still part of security that javascript isn’t allowed to parse XML (RSS/ATOM) cross-domain, I had to look for an external replacement service. I found SuperFeedr with a similar API to the Google Feed API, but I decided I was to lazy to sign up for a new service, and it seems you have to whitelist the feeds before you can request them. I don’t like manual labor. An hour ago I realized Google App Engine supports PHP now, and in the distant past I used a PHP script to pull in the feeds. 10 minutes later I am back in business at hud-demo. Nice, and free. However, the script used to cache the data for 5 minutes, and since App Engine offers no regular filesystem access, this turns out to be impossible. I could store data in blobstore, but that requires a registered credit card. So, for now, I will let the cache slide and accept a long(ish) load time for the page. On the todo there’s a longstanding plan to ‘spin-out’ the feeds-page to some sort of HUD website: basically feeds plus some bar with links to services I frequently use. Should be ready soon!