Announcing Planet use Perl! (Sorta.)

I do not at all like the RSS feed for the most recently updated use Perl journals as it comes. That it has no entry content is only a slight annoyance compared to the fact that it does not point to individual entries, just to journals. As such I never have any indication of how many entries anyone has written since the last time I read their posts.

So I did what any good hacker does and fixed the situation myself. The new trick in the resulting XSLT stylesheet is that does not use its input document at all, it pulls the relevant RSS feeds itself using the document() function. I just use <null/> as the source document and the rest happens on its own.

This even necessitated some changes to my driver script to cope with the fact that I’m not scraping HTML.

However, in its current form it pulls 21 pretty large generated files from the server every single time it runs – rather rude. The fix involves using document() once more, reading the stylesheet’s own previous output and concluding from there. I will take a stab at that sometime in the near future.