Title

Good Stuff

Ruby on Rails is great with a clean framework, fun language, and an active community.

Why the Lucky Stiff

Ruby on Rails

Ruby

Two things melt my face: fire, and Nine Inch Nails. Their latest album Ghosts is very nice.

Nine Inch Nails

I love this site. Play ’’Bammi’’.

PointlessSites.com

Want to train and don’t know how, or don’t want to pay for an on-line e-coach? Meet Athlo. It’s my latest project. We just rolled out an alpha with tons of development forecasted for the next few months.

Athlo

OmniNerd is like my first child. It the first “real” site I ever wrote. I play a much smaller role these days, but it’s still a great site.

OmniNerd

Ruby On Rails RSS Reader

We moved our Athlo blog to a http://wordpress.org/:WordPress app to separate it completely from the main app. One interaction I wanted between the two though was that I wanted the most recent blog entries to show on the Athlo site. I thought that RSS would offer an easy solution so I started looking around to find out if I’d need a Rails plugin or something like that.

The solution was far simpler. And pure Ruby (man I love this language!).


require 'rss'
rss = RSS::Parser.parse(open('http://blog.athlo.com/feed/').read, false).items[0..MaxRSSItems-1]

That’s it. That simple call supplies you with a full array of all the items from the RSS feed. In my specific example, I’ve used a range to limit the results to the value of MaxRSSItems.

No plugins required. No Rails required. Ruby RSS will do what you need to read feeds. (That should be in a poem.)

Posted 12 July 2008