tail -f development.log

I ran into an interesting “issue” this past week while using the atom_feed_helper plugin for Rails.

The plugin is designed to be a quick, easy-to-use way to generate ATOM feeds for your controllers. An interesting issue with the plugin is that it doesn’t allow you to manually set each ATOM entries link URL. The plugin sets the link field manually using the _polymorphic_url()_ method.

@xml.link(:rel => 'alternate', :type => 'text/html', :href => @view.polymorphic_url(record))

My problem with this arose when trying to generate a feed for a nested resource. I wanted to generate an ATOM feed for all Comments left on a certain Question in my Rails application. Comments are not viewed individually, but rather as a threaded list in the Show method of the Question to which they belong. The URL generated by the _polymorphic_url()_ call didn’t quite handle this properly.

The more I thought about this, I can see other instances as well where you might want to manually specify a certain URL for each entry link. So I went about making the following change to the plugin and am going to be submitting the patch to the Rails team as an enhancement.

def entry(record, link = nil)
  @xml.entry do
    @xml.id("tag:#{@view.request.host_with_port},2007:#{record.class}#{record.id}")
    @xml.published(record.created_at.xmlschema) if record.respond_to?(:created_at)
    @xml.updated(record.updated_at.xmlschema) if record.respond_to?(:updated_at)

    yield @xml

    entry_link = link.nil? ? @view.polymorphic_url(record) : link
    @xml.link(:rel => 'alternate', :type => 'text/html', :href => entry_link)
  end
end

FeedCache is nearly the version 1.0 release.

Currently, version 0.9.5 is available on wordpress.org. There are two new features that will be included in the 1.0 release which should be available before the end of the year.

If you have been using FeedCache and have any features you would like to see included, please let me know. Also, if you’ve found any bugs or issues with the plugin, let me know that as well so I can fix the problems.

There is a new version of the FeedCache WordPress plugin available for BETA testing for all who are interested.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedcache/download/

To get the BETA version, instead of clicking the “Download Plugin” button, click the “Development Version” link that is listed under the “Other Versions” sections. I’ve been testing it out, and I would like some folks to help me test before I update and make the new 0.7 version the newest stable version.

The whole setup of the plugin has changed now that there are multiple sections of feeds so your best bet is to just deactivate the existing plugin and delete the whole /feedcache directory from your /wp-content/plugins directory and just install the new 0.7 as if you had never used it before.

Let me know if you have any trouble installing and/or using it and if the installation instructions aren’t clear enough.

It’s now official. I’ve left RatePoint and joined the team at Wis.dm.

I really enjoyed my time at RatePoint getting the company up and running. Over the past 10 months we released 4 different Rails apps: a social website ratings service, a badge reputation service, an avatar rating service for SecondLife, and an API to automate signups for the badge reseller program.

Wis.dm is another Ruby on Rails web startup that is taking on the question/answer space. I’m excited to get started there and see where we can take the site.

The FeedCache plugin is now in the official WordPress directory and can be downloaded for public use.

The plugin code is stable at this point, but I’m still tweaking some error checking in the Ruby CRON script. Right now there are a few issues with HTTP timeouts and XML feed parsing that can be improved upon.

Look for the next version of the plugin to be released sometime by next week.