RSS on a Linux PDA (SL-5500)

[burton@openprivacy.org]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1


Permalink to this entry: http://www.peerfear.org/rss/permalink/1029498479.shtml

LinuxWorld is now officially over.  The highlight of the event for me was my
purchase of an Zaurus SL-5500 [1] Linux PDA.  I haven't had a PDA since I sold
my PalmV because it didn't have enough memory.

http://www.sharp-usa.com/images/hpc_sl55502002_pic2_h174.jpg

I used to *love* the Avantgo [2] application that would enable the user to subscribe
to sites and get news on their Palm.  It does not look like this is available
for the SL-5500 and even if it was I wouldn't want to use it anyway.

So tonight I hacked together RSS support for the SL-5500.  Basically it works
like this.

Given a blogroll in mod_subscription format, we use an XSL stylesheet which
applies templates to the URL using the XSLT document() function.  Basically this
fetches the URL and processes the contents within the current XSLT transform.

I am using the Xalan rewrite extension to write .html files for each RSS channel
within my [4] subscriptions.  

In the end we have a directory filled with files like "DayPop.html" and "Boing
Boing.html" with a master index file.  

I then scp the data to my PDA (this is Linux remember and it runs an SSH daemon)
under /home/root/news (yes... it runs as root... yuk).

I copied the output [5] to peerfear.org if anyone is interested.

Here is a screenshot:

http://www.peerfear.org/download/sc_12.47.35_Wed_Jan_02_2002.png

There are a number of things I should fix in the long term:

- - would be nice the images are included locally

- - we should use favicons for the links

- - we should fail by keeping the old content if a channel can't be fetched.

Most of this will be incorporated into the Bonita RSS client I am working on.
So I will just have to wait until the source is available.

This also points out why people should be using mod_content for their RSS
channels.  If the content of the article is included the PDA does not have to
connect to the network to download the article.  When sitting at a coffee shop
or waiting for a bus (without a network) this can be VERY handy.  Right now only
a few sites are using mod_content.  We should really try to get Moveable Type to
support this by default.

I will provide links to all the source code if anyone wants it...

1. http://more.sbc.co.jp/slj/index.asp
2. http://www.avantgo.com
4. http://www.peerfear.org/bookmarks/Personal_Toolbar_Folder/blogroll-rss/index.shtml
5. http://www.peerfear.org/download/subscriptions
- -- 
Kevin A. Burton ( burton@apache.org, burton@openprivacy.org, burton@peerfear.org )
             Location - San Francisco, CA, Cell - 415.595.9965
        Jabber - burtonator@jabber.org,  Web - http://www.peerfear.org/
        GPG fingerprint: 4D20 40A0 C734 307E C7B4  DCAA 0303 3AC5 BD9D 7C4D
         IRC - openprojects.net #infoanarchy | #p2p-hackers | #reptile

For great justice.



-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Get my public key at: http://relativity.yi.org/pgpkey.txt

iD8DBQE9XOyRAwM6xb2dfE0RAk/sAKC26E3+VoWBoXRnvMHNI5vwpi0nBgCcCFJe
n1e3WiJNZfzjfaVuP6RXlTY=
=2JiW
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----