Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Creating an Aggregator without XML-RPC

Author:Jim Goodman
Posted:10/12/1999; 10:51:53 AM
Topic:Creating an Aggregator without XML-RPC
Msg #:11959 (In response to 11939)
Prev/Next:11958 / 11960

to continue the discussion.... here is some more information and pieces of the puzzle that i use to aggregate information.

this is the template that builds the table for my comparison charts for digital music. it produces a page like this (and yes, i know that MP3 is broken). if you take a look at the template and view the source, you will see how newsclipper parses the information in the template page, outputting another document. i have also included the handlers as they call them for the MP3 stuff. there are several separate ones, and they will give you a better understanding of how they work together. they are....

MP3 DAM cd
featured songs
new songs
top songs

Newsclipper also includes a neat little perl program called makehandler that goes through a number of steps and asks questions, configuring and "programming" the handler for you even though the user may know little or no programming (me).

as far as netreaper goes. that is a much easier interface to use for beginners. i have put up the help file to give you a better understanding of the program. basically it has all the fields needed (in "english") such as find, get until, save as (variable), print, loop, etc. as a user, i just select the process that i want (find) and then give it the variable i want it to act upon. save the file and then execute it. here is an example of the agent file that netreaper uses (created by the user) and acts upon. this one was created to grab the billboard top 100.

as i have mentioned before. I LOVE FRONTIER. but if the user interface was jazzed up, in other words, make the really cool stuff, that can be difficult to do (aggregation, channels etc.) and make it idiot proof. if it was as easy to use as these other programs tens of thousands of folks would buy the software. i'm convinced of that! frontier is easily one of the most powerful tools out there on the net for content generation and management, but with all of this power i would hope that together, it can be made easier to use for us non-programmers.



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