Python Community Server: Development

Asking Google to tell me about rss category site:weblogs.com yields some interesting links.

On November 28, 2001, Dave Winer announced a new beta feature on Weblogs.Com - communities.  When pinging Weblogs.Com, your blogging tool could pass in a string representing a community you belong to, and your blog would appear on a list specific to that community.

The interesting bit is in the middle, where he says "If you have an RSS feed try pinging with categoryname "rss"", and "We will make Radio 7.1 compatible so that RSS feeds participate in the RSS category".  Looks like it took a little longer than that!

Now, this is the method Radio is currently using for the RSS ping.  Going back to Google, there's another interesting result: Weblogs.Com News: Weblogs.Com for RSS (dated 3 days ago - October 24, 2002).  This looks like it's going to be the public announcement for this feature.  It introduces another XML-RPC endpoint, the rssUpdate( name, url ) one I discovered yesterday.

This is a little confusing; should we listen to the announcement and use rssUpdate()?  Or should we emulate Radio and use weblogUpdates.ping( name, url, url, 'rss' )?

Been doing a bit of hacking around in Radio today.  Trying to find out where the code for the Weblogs.Com RSS ping is located.

One good trick I've found when messing with Radio is to use table.tableToXml as much as possible.  I'm not so familiar with the Radio IDE yet, but tableToXml lets me export a whole database out as XML, and I can then use the usual tools (grep and UltraEdit) to look at it.

file.WriteWholeFile( "c:\\radio.xml", table.tableToXml( @radio ) );

Searching for 'and your local community server' (the text that appears on the event log when the RSS ping goes out) reveals the system.verbs.builtins.radio.thread.agents.pingWeblogsCom function.  It looks like it's using the normal Weblogs.Com ping function (weblogUpdates.ping()), except passing 'rss' as the category name.  I wonder where the rssUpdate function came from ... ?

I've just changed bzero to use that method.  Let's see if it works for this post.

Update: It worked!