I've spent the weekend in a kind of code-induced daze, the fruits of which are the first-ever ROX RSS feed.
I created an Atom feed first, but I couldn't view it in either of the news aggregators I installed (NetNewsWire and Shrook) even though they're both listed as "Atom-enabled." (Upon closer inspection, I note the fine print, which sez "coming soon.") But the Atom psec is only in version 0.3, so perhaps it's just as well to stick with RSS 2.0 for now.
The feed validates, and I've linked it to the menu at the bottom of our pages and submitted it to Syndic8, and it shows up in the new My Yahoo feature — but is it worth it?
I just don't know. But it's been fun to play with.
Also, and this actually took much more of my time, I solved a problem that's been bugging me, by adding a new column to the lookup table that relates all ROX records to one another. Previously this had been nothing but ordered pairs specifying parent and child IDs. Now I've introduced an ordinal number for each relation. This means that any group of relations can now be ordered arbitrarily.
Right now, I'm using this for the display of picture albums and media lists on the site.
The real bitch, though, was building the DHTML menus in my content-management system to allow the easy reordering of related records. Some albums or lists consist of over a hundred items, and there's really no convenient way to reorder that many records.
— posted by B on February 1st, 2004
