Zilla Smash!

Yes, shenanigans is overused. That doesn’t decrease my love of the word by any noticeable amount.

I’ve got my RSSDB (omg stolen name) updating and cleaning up after itself properly. This is important, as I was getting lots of duplicate posts and stale stuff previously. It’s now removing all feed items older than 1 month before updating. Obviously this might run into space/time issues if it became popular or something but that seems like an awful silly concern to me. I have no misconceptions about how popular any of the myriad number of random utilities I’ve created are.

In the past couple of days I’ve gotten my RSS filtering up and running properly. It’s doing all the things a good RSS filtering tool should do:

• - Adding a brand-new RSS feed to a filter will add it to the RSSDB and update it.
• - You can have multiple filters outputting to one filtered feed.
• - It has spiffy JS interactions using stuff that people much smarter than I have recommended, making the JS pretty quick.
• - Public & Private JS! (Nobody should care about this but it was a fun experiment.)
• - Silk Icons! Ok, this list is getting silly.
• - I’ve harnessed the power of Add To Any to allow easy adding of feeds to readers. That site provides one hell of a cool service. I approve.
• - XML files of feeds that have been deleted are now cleaned up nightly. I didn’t want a public-facing script doing that cleanup because people are jerks. This app is full of holes as-is, might as well not give people a hook into unlink() on my box.

All in all it is a start. I’m having fun writing it and am finding this incredibly useful. Now that I’ve got the RSSDB no longer deleting everything each time it updates (hey the difference between “< " and ">” is hard) things should be much smoother. Next on my plate is coming up with a quick and dirty global user system, I keep writing tools that require some sort of user auth and I’ve always either ignored it or come up with some sort of really awful solution. No more! Now I will have a really awful solution I can use globally!

Oh right, a link to the tool. Please don’t delete my feeds I like them and would hate to lose them. FeedFilter (yes it’s ugly shut up, form styling is a bitch.)