Bruce's Blog

My project for the night was to create a script to generate an RSS feed for WTF Comics. WTF Comics is a comic set in the Everquest world that has a continuous story line. A very entertaining read for a former EQ addict like myself. WTF Comics was one of the few sites that I check that doesn't have an RSS feed yet so it seemed like a good project.

What I thought was going to take me an hour tops was a good four hour affair spent learning (and relearning) the following things:

• Mozilla's View Source feature changes HTML tags from upper case to lower case. I ended up fighting with a regular expression in vain because I didn't know Mozilla didn't just colorized the source but also fucked with it.
• Regular expressions suck. I can't believe that after a billion or so years of evolution on this planet the apex species on this planet would be satisfied with regular expressions as a basic form of pattern recognition. Grrrrr.....
• There are multiple different RSS standards with different XML formats. Did you know that RSS 1.0 is actually much more complicated and has more bells and whistles then RSS 2.0? I will have to sit down and read through the specs one of these nights. For now I'm happy with copying the RSS 2.0 from working examples and having validators be happy with it.
• I hate regular expressions.
• My hosting company apparently configured apache to treat any filename with ".py" in any part of it as a CGI script. Unfortunately it also thinks "foo.py.gz" and "foo.py.zip" are CGI scripts too....
• I really hate dealing with regular expressions.

The feed is available here and the script is available here (useless screenshot here).