use Perl

Today hasn't been a total success! This morning I tried to have a shower to discover that only freezing cold water came out of the shower head. Shortly after giving up on a warm shower we discovered that the shower was leaking. Thankfully we only rent, so the landlord has to pick up the cost of the plumber coming out to isolate the shower (the isolation valves had also seized up), so that we could turn the water mains back on.

Surprisingly things have got better, so I can't complain that much. I've finally finished the first draft of an article I promised brian d foy ages ago. It'll need working on, but it's a more complete story than the notes I've been sending him for the last few weeks.

I've also done some more work on my RSS module, adding more documentation, and extra links, ready for a beta launch sometime in January before I go back to work. I'm fairly happy with the current code, I just want to test it with the next version of XML::RSS, to make sure all it fine.

My own module still has at it's core and evil hack, I'm converting RSS versions via Perl using XML::RSS, which I feel is an un-pure solution, and so I've decided to push on and try for a pure XML solution, by writing XSL-T style-sheets that convert all 7 know versions of RSS into one "simple and neutral" format that can then be converted to XHTML with one simple style-sheet. Some recent stories, have fired my desire to get this done.

• What is RSS? by Mark Pilgrim, which is a good introduction to RSS, with some Python examples.
• Simple RSS with Perl by brian d foy, another introduction to RSS with Perl examples
• Namespaces and Stylesheet Logic by Bob DuCharme, author of XSLT Quickly, discusses the evils of converting XML documents with name-space via XSL-T.
• Content Syndication with RSS by Ben Hammersley due out in March 2003, has also added fire, as I hope be able to prove my suggestion to Ben of using XSL-T instead of brute-force programming.