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project progress
2014-12-06 07:00 pmI feel a bit embarrassed. I spent all afternoon working on my pet project (even forgot to wash lunch dishes until my husband came home for supper! Oh dear!) and here I am, trying not to talk myself out of writing about it. (....I've scanned that last bit and, while I'm not sure if it has anything close to grammar, it does indeed reflect the indecision I'm experiencing. Yay?)
I got the FOAF bit working by relentlessly preg_replace-ing all the namespaces away. It's shamefully hacky, but having the namespaces present in the header makes the entire object blank, and I don't have any idea why, so I'm just trying to route around the damage. I'd been trying to decide whether or not to post all my source publicly; resorting to this hackery means that I think I won't. I'm unprepared to support my code on outside servers anyway. Maybe in the future, sometime, but not this year. I just hope it doesn't break in the meantime, because my fix is an all-or-nothing deal and if it doesn't work, then my project is missing certain bits of data.
A week ago, I don't think I have ever tried parsing OPML beyond a Yahoo! Pipes experiment. I know I hadn't learned how to encode and decode JSON in PHP, or save a string to a new file. These are things I've had to learn as I went. It took me forever, because I had to learn each bit from scratch instead of just implementing previous learning, but it's coming along and I know more stuff now and that feels pretty awesome.
I don't think I ever stated exactly what my project is. That's because I don't know what to call it. I wanted to see just how much data the Dreamwidth API produces for a single account. Turns out, quite a bit! http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Data_Sources lists them. After discovering this, I tried mashing these up to make a sort of homepage for a specific Dreamwidth community, one made almost entirely from Dreamwidth's data. The idea was that changes to the community would automatically appear on the webpage as well - things like a list of current mods, numbers of posts, any deadlines listed in the profile "bio", even the comm's default icon - so that the webpage wouldn't be out of date and the mods wouldn't need to update the page separately, so long as the comm was up to date.
This turned out to be far more fun, and far more frustrating, than I had imagined. The fun wins, though.
(Did I really, just today, figure out how to make arrays from two different data files in different formats, compare them, sort the results, and save it all to a flat file? I'm pretty sure that I did. I've even edited the flat file to compare it against the live data. Apparently that is a thing I can do now!)
I got the FOAF bit working by relentlessly preg_replace-ing all the namespaces away. It's shamefully hacky, but having the namespaces present in the header makes the entire object blank, and I don't have any idea why, so I'm just trying to route around the damage. I'd been trying to decide whether or not to post all my source publicly; resorting to this hackery means that I think I won't. I'm unprepared to support my code on outside servers anyway. Maybe in the future, sometime, but not this year. I just hope it doesn't break in the meantime, because my fix is an all-or-nothing deal and if it doesn't work, then my project is missing certain bits of data.
A week ago, I don't think I have ever tried parsing OPML beyond a Yahoo! Pipes experiment. I know I hadn't learned how to encode and decode JSON in PHP, or save a string to a new file. These are things I've had to learn as I went. It took me forever, because I had to learn each bit from scratch instead of just implementing previous learning, but it's coming along and I know more stuff now and that feels pretty awesome.
I don't think I ever stated exactly what my project is. That's because I don't know what to call it. I wanted to see just how much data the Dreamwidth API produces for a single account. Turns out, quite a bit! http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Data_Sources lists them. After discovering this, I tried mashing these up to make a sort of homepage for a specific Dreamwidth community, one made almost entirely from Dreamwidth's data. The idea was that changes to the community would automatically appear on the webpage as well - things like a list of current mods, numbers of posts, any deadlines listed in the profile "bio", even the comm's default icon - so that the webpage wouldn't be out of date and the mods wouldn't need to update the page separately, so long as the comm was up to date.
This turned out to be far more fun, and far more frustrating, than I had imagined. The fun wins, though.
(Did I really, just today, figure out how to make arrays from two different data files in different formats, compare them, sort the results, and save it all to a flat file? I'm pretty sure that I did. I've even edited the flat file to compare it against the live data. Apparently that is a thing I can do now!)
