Category: Meta

When I wrote DIYBlog it occurred to me that what I was writing would translate into a blog aggregator pretty easily, and so I’m working on making that so. I’d like to start a little community of Java developers who are working on small free and open source software Java programs, so we can start to communicate through our blogs and help each other out with thorny issues e.g. how to get our programs working with an all free software systems (more on that later).

For the moment I’m working on aggregating my own favourite feeds, which you can see here: Planet Andy. All this is/will be running on pure FTP web space, with a little cron job running on my own machine to keep it updated. Of course, that does mean it only works when my machine is turned on…

I’ve made a page about how I’m making this blog, here: DIYBlog. I may even get around to putting it on freshmeat at some point, and if others want to contribute I may even put it on SourceForge.

I think I’ve managed to work out a system to make RSS work. Basically I write my blog entries into a raw RSS file, and then run a little Python script to add ids, links etc. and generate an HTML page from that. It’s been a hassle to write (mainly due to timezones, which I’ve now decided to ignore) and if anyone’s interested in some highly-customisable blogging software that only requires FTP on your web host, get in touch, especially if you’re the kind of person who thinks its cool to hand-code your RSS.