PatCavit.com

I end up writing a lot of code to avoid having to do in-depth searching for an already-built solution. I just wrote a basic cookied user authentication system for FeedFilter (and the rest of Tivac.com, I guess) because I didn’t want to go trawling through the MOUNTAINS of PHP code online that do just that.

I think in the end I made the right decision, as it was a pretty small problem and solving it myself means that I know the code inside and out and it does exactly what I need it to. There’s no extraneous code involved, although I will fess up to commenting more than usual. The reason for adding a user authentication system to FeedFilter is pretty obvious. When I first psoted it onto my blog someone went in and deleted my two filters to add some of their own. While I’m all for sharing information and letting other people see what I’m filtering I was a little put out by that. I was using those filters!

So all filters are now tied to a user, and the feeds they output are also uniquely indentified per user. So two users could name their filters the same thing and it wouldn’t be a problem. I’m still not entirely happy about the output arrangement I have. Currently all filter rss feeds are output to one folder that allows browsing. While I’m not particularly paranoid about this, someone else who may use this service (Unlikely though that may be) might not like that so much. Maybe I should do some sort of Google Calendar-esque solution. Maybe later. For right now there’s all of two people using this so unless it bothers one of us it isn’t likely to be changed.