dingbat@c... (Andy Dingley) wrote in message > 
> I have to ask why anyone needs to write RSS scripts these days ? 
> (Although I spent yesterday doing it myself).  There are very many
> already out there, and it's a rare situation that really needs
> something written from scratch.

I think that is a fair question. Part of the answer would be, I guess,
we want to be able to assert that our weblog software is "complete" in
some sense. Without RSS, it is not complete. The other aspect of it,
call it an institutional mission, is that we want to donate all our
code to the public domain. That means we often have to do things from
scratch, because other we might use is copyrighted. There is a lot of
good code under the GPL, but the GPL is too restrictive for our
purposes.



 
> I suggest that you learn a bit more detailed XML (entities for one
> thing, namespaces for another) and learn how to read a formal DTD.
> It's one thing to make a feed work once during testing, but quite
> another to make a reliable feed that handles all the data it will meet
> over its lifetime. 

I really would love to learn more about XML and I've bought a bunch
books from O'Reilly. Sadly, I'm stretched a little thin. Me and some
friends have been working on a content management system and I've had
to learn a lot about a lot of different stuff, and I haven't had the
chance to become very good at anything. I'd like to know more about
XML, XHTML, Apache, CSS 2.0, RSS, Linux, Windows XP, mime types,
character encodings, SOAP, Java, web services, Flash, PostGreSql,
Swing, MySql, encryption and a whole lot more. It's all just too much.
My hope, at this point, is they'll come a point when the basic
abilities of our CMS are stable enough that I can go over it again and
go deeper into certain areas when my knowledge is better. That, or
maybe our project can pick up some programmers who are more talented
than I.

We're giving away our (still quite buggy) software here:

http://www.publicdomainsoftware.org/