gregdoolittle.com

after spending way too much time contemplating the idea of writing my own code to syndicate my livejournal rss feed into my site, i’ve come to terms with this practical alternative. i’m sure i could’ve written the code… eventually ;b… it probably would have been a hack-job, and wouldn’t have looked as clean as this movable type blog, but… if i had a few weekends to dedicate to the cause, i think i could’ve done it. but i’m busy. and i’m not exactly a php wizard (yet!). when i know more about php, i’ll make sure i do something cool with it.

i’m taking intro to javascript as well as php (with mysql) this fall. both classes are online, which is pretty convenient. javascript should come fairly quickly since i took intro to programming with java. but php is kinda scary. i’m a little worried that this particular class will be too much all at once. it seems like a really cool language, based on how much you can do with it, and how simple everything looks on paper, but it’s also intimidating. i don’t have the required pre-requisites, but the teacher said i could take it if i’m willing to work really hard. i’ve never used mysql, so that’s another intimidating factor.

i’ve been lagging on syndicating this journal to my website. i need to officially put a hold on that idea. i’ve been meaning to spend time on it, but with weddings and birthdays and everything else, i’ve just been too busy. at some point during this semester, i’ll take another look at “php-embedding” this site. i don’t have time now (especially with school starting), and it’ll be easier then.

i set up a little mail() script on my website. i’m a little afraid of it being abused so i don’t want to post a link to it. this was my first (server) script; it was really exciting to see the script work when i sent myself an email from my domain. now i’ve got to figure out how to validate input fields… that should be a challenge!

i found livejournal’s guide on syndicating your livejournal account. they don’t mention using javascript/rss/xsl. instead they recommend buying an account so that you can create your own style on livejournal’s site. go figure. if you pay them, they give you a feed to your journal formatted the way you’ve specified. but i’m too stubborn to do this, and it seems like a cop-out. i’m still going to try to use DOM and ActiveXObjects with RSS and XSL. i’m sure if i ever learn perl, i’ll look back and wonder why any of this was hard… (or why i didn’t just get a paid account!)

i want to take the rss feed of this journal, and put it on my website. i started to write the xslt that would format my rss feed into something that looked like it came from my website. i got through a good part of it before realizing that i wouldn’t be able to reference the xslt from my rss. why not? :: as far as my class was concerned, the only way to perform an xslt transformation on an xml document was to have a line referring to the xslt in the xml doc. i have no way of modifying the rss document to add any style sheet or transformation template to it… :: so, i’ve been researching different approaches to the solution. the two that sound like they might work best are javascript and php.

javascript solution would mean learning about DOM and writing a script that will load my rss file as an xml document, load my xslt document, and return the result of the transformation. this script would be inserted on the body of a page dedicated to syndicating my journal. it would automatically update itself each time the page is loaded. the only problems with this method of syndication are that the content will not be searchable by a web-spider/search-engine (no biggie for me), and that not all browsers are javascript enabled. php is a very similar solution, except that the two javascript problems are solved, and a new one arises: i have no clue how to write php. i’m going for the javascript / DOM model for accessibility reasons. it will also be a nice primer for my javascript course i’m taking next semester.