Hackdiary

A mail sent to RSS-DEV about work in progress on picdiary and its use of RSS for cataloguing photos.

Subject: Re: [RSS-DEV] RSS and Libraries
From: mb@p…
Date: Tue Dec 17, 2002 9:18 pm

On Mon, Dec 16, 2002 at 05:14:33PM +0000, Libby Miller wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Dec 2002, se teague wrote:
> > I’m so happy to find this group! I’ve been developing an
> > RSS/Perl/PHP/MySQL based rss program to generate news and events for the
> > academic library I work for. i do have a question though; We haven’t
> > tackled associating images with RSS items rather than channels. Has
> > anyone done this before? Any best practices out there?
>
> I rather like what Matt Biddulph’s been doing, e.g.:
> https://www.picdiary.com/rss/barcelona_conf.rss

Thanks Libby. To (over)elaborate:

My site (https://www.picdiary.com) is just a blog of collections of
pictures. There’s not much text, the pictures are the main focus and
just have a few lines of description. For a while it’s been lacking good
search facilities, and was built out of static HTML.

I decided to use RSS 1.0 as the ‘container’ format for each picture
collection. RSS works just as well for pictures-as-items as it does for
html-pages-as-items – they’re all just web links. So I wrote a bunch of
simple perl scripts to read in RSS and display them as web pages. For
example, The link Libby gave above can be viewed at

https://www.picdiary.com/new/barcelona_conf?rss=barcelona_conf.rss&page=1

or of course it can be viewed in a newsreader/aggregator.

If you look in the HTML source of that page, you’ll see a line like
this:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS”
href=”https://www.picdiary.com/rss/barcelona_conf.rss”>

This is following the rss autodiscovery standard so that spiders can
find the RSS metadata from the webpage.

Using RSS 1.0’s RDF capability, I can add all sorts of metadata to
channels and items with a few extra tags in the RSS. That particular
feed uses FOAF to say that certain pictures are of people like Libby.
Other (more recent) feeds such as
https://www.picdiary.com/rss/highwalk.rss also use Dublin Core to give
the creator and date of the channel, and Wordnet to list keywords
associated with each picture (item).

There’s a (prerelease) search engine that indexes all the RSS and uses
the Wordnet terms (and exploits Wordnet’s synonym and hypernym
relationships between words to give better search results) at
https://www.picdiary.com/cgi-bin/search.pl?word=building
If you look ‘behind the scenes’ of that search engine at
https://www.picdiary.com:8180/rss/search?word=building
then you’ll see that the search results themselves are returned as
dynamically-built RSS channels then rendered into HTML by some perl. So
you could subscribe to the search results if you wanted to.

Ramble ramble. There’s quite a lot to say, feel free to followup or mail
me off-list for more information.

Cheers,
Matt.