If vrtnieuws.net’s HTML were at least slightly semantic, it’d be a lot easier to parse. I never realized my regular expression didn’t match the top article (the one with the pinkish border). I hacked it a little. It now looks atrocious and totally useless, but guess what, it does work.
Better late than never: I’m finally sitting at the new desk I mentioned ages ago. Now I need a new chair, screen (still waiting for the Samsung 173P Plus), keyboard, mouse pad and hopefully speakers—the B&W 604s are still the plan, though I have no idea where to put them yet.
No one gives a damn, but thanks to my XSL-fu, I was able to style the FeedGen feeds a bit so you can view them in your browser first. Try it out with the vrtnieuws.net Atom 1.0 feed or any other. Now that FeedView’s gone again, that might be useful to some people. Even though XSL feels a little complicated, I think I might take a closer look at it soon.
Update: All that should work like a charm in at least Mozilla Firefox/Seamonkey, Internet Explorer 6 (yep, really!), Safari 1.3, but not Opera.
Due to some quirk at F2O—I think—the feeds generated by my FeedMe Perl thingamajig had been broken for a while. As much as I hate PHP, I decided to rewrite the thing in it the other day. While it’s just over 100 lines long, it already has feed template support and pluggable feed parsers. Unfortunately, some stuff is still hard-coded, which definitely needs to change before I release the source. Anyway, the bottom line is, the vrtnieuws.net feed is back up, be it in RSS 2.0 instead of Atom. However, the aforementioned template support will provide you with an Atom 1.0 version sometime in the near future. And perhaps RSS 1.0 and Atom 0.3. Also available is a feed of bangbang023’s Firefox nightly builds, which is only useful to people running Windows on an SSE2-capable processor and wanting to try out bleeding-edge goodness. Like me. I love those builds.
Update: You can now append :atom10 to feed URLs for an Atom 1.0 version. The default is :rss20 since it’s more widely supported.
If anyone wants to try Google Talk, be sure to add ceetee at gmail dot com to your contact list.