RoseRSS (public announcement)

[stobor]

So, those of you that follow my other blog already know about this. But I figured more people might want to know that over the past couple weeks I've been developing an unofficial RSS feed for the Rose-Hulman News page. Its a perl script that scrapes the content out of the pages, dumps it into a database, and builds the xml file for the 20 most

Comments

Rose webmasters

[anh_irrsinn]

I wouldn't be so sure they were just shrugging it off. One of the teams in my CSSE Project Management course rewrote their news archiver, and although they sort of failed to complete the project, the framework may be there to allow easy addition of things like RSS feeds. *shrug*

From the team's report, the old system was very, very chaotic--the team ended up spending the ten weeks of their implementation time making something that would migrate old entries into a nicely standardized entries. Chaos. But now that things are standardized, it could be that bigger improvements will be made.

--Lissa
http://irrsinn.net

Re: Rose webmasters

[stobor]

Yeah, I guess 'shrugged off' may have not been the best phrasing. I gathered from when i dug through the site that it was very chaotic and it wouldn't be easy to add, but I kind of figured that RSS was a question that had been brought up more than once, and I wasn't given a response that suggested it was coming any time soon. If the email had said "yes, we have an awesome new student-designed framework that might allow for this kind of thing, and we are investigating using it," I probably wouldn't have been as motivated to write the aforementioned script.

I guess I am just really surprised at how 1995ish the Rose site still is. The top undergrad engineering school in the country should be able to pull together the talent to make a site that doesn't use flash for some of its main content(somebody please make that ticker in JS already...), wasn't made in frontpage, and kept a consistent design throughout all pages

[zowch]

rhit_news