News You Can Bruise for 2005 May 9

(4) Mon May 09 2005 08:09 PST: What's a webpage you've always wished had an RSS feed? I need a demo site for the RSS feed builder. I've already done two, but one is for the O'Reilly book and the other (new books from Dover) requires some fancy scraping that makes it too complicated to be an example.

(5) Mon May 09 2005 10:59 PST: Yesterdate, the 8th of May, I installed seeds in my garden. Sunflowers, watermelons, corn, and "garden beans" (As opposed to beans that grow in the rec room? They look like green beans so I planted them.). I mention this so that I'll have a record of when I planted these things. I don't remember when I planted the potatoes, so I don't know when to reap the harvest. I don't even know how potato plants work. I guess I'll find out when I dig one up.

Still to plant: canteloupe, pumpkin. Already planted: potatoes, rhubarb, garlic.

My mother says there's no way to know what to grow: you just have to plant things and see if they die or not. Nothing grew when I planted last year, but I planted way too late and also the soil in my backyard was all dead. Not even weeds were growing there. I don't have that problem anymore!

Mon May 09 2005 22:21 PST Scrape 'N' Feed: I came up with a name for my RSS feed helper, and fixed it up, and I hereby release it. I don't know if I'm allowed to put that example on the actual page to illustrate the module, or if it has to be first published in the O'Reilly book.

I probably never would have come up with the idea for this module if it hadn't been for the need to compress the large feed-scraping problem into a small "Hacks" entry. I've never done so much work for a hundred dollars. (However, I have done a whole lot more work for nothing.) You are the privileged recipients; my feed-scraping has never been easier than with this module. Though sometimes I get the feeling that scraping web pages into RSS feeds is just an obscure hobby of me and a few others.

Update: Actually I have done more work for less than a hundred dollars. When I was about 10, I dug up a huge tree stump in the side yard. It took me most of the summer, on and off. I think I got fifty dollars for it.