vdboor

One of the things I really wanted to implement was a "Planet KMess" section at the KMess website. I've been looking for existing solutions, but couldn't find what I was looking for. I don't need expanding sections, or forum/e-mail like "mark as read" capabilities. Just a simple web page with all stories, posted in order.

As for why I'm not using Planet: the Planet KDE site is flooded with old feeds now and then. I don't want to see that happening for a "Planet KMess" website. Planet is written in Python and uses a file-based cache. This is a complete black box for me as Python illiterate, and adds Python as new dependency to the web site.

The result is a new Planet-like feed reader/aggregator named PhpPlanet. It is v0.1 software and can be downloaded here. It stores feeds in a MySQL database, and uses Snoopy/MagpieRSS to parse the feeds. Flooding is avoided by observing the timestamp of RSS entries. When multiple entries have the same timestamp it's an indication the feed is regenerated, and those entries will be rejected automatically.

A recent enhancement in KMess is support for "now listening" information. You get to see what your contacts are playing. this information is displayed after the personal status message, and looks like this:

Much like the official client, you get small icon, and the title afterwards.

The next step is offcourse, displaying what you're playing. Work has started, and I've decided to use Kopete's "now listening" plugin as inspiration. It has support for Amarok, Kaffeine, Juk, KsCD, Noatun and XMMS. Sounds good enough to me

I've been thinking for a long time about it, but finally decided to start my own weblog. I've been reading planetkde.org for some time now, and really like the sneak previews and thoughts about the progress in KDE.

So this blog also won't be flooded with personal things either. Instead I like to share some programming experiences, KMess improvements, and maybe some random things found at the web. Not sure how it will work out, but I'm all set now to find that out