Ajax Chat

Yes, I know there are a lot of Ajaxchatapplications out there, some moreadvanced than others. Which is precisely why I'm writing my own. It's a well defined application which should let me worry about learning the techniques and not about developing ground breaking new features. Chat is not quite the Hello World of Ajax, but it's one of the simplest yet useful things I could do. I didn't learn very much by writing an Ajax Hello World example and it's completely pointless :-)

Lunarforums feeds

I'm currently using Lunarpages to host daybarr.com and am very pleased with their service and support. To help keep on top of the latest news, I thought I'd try and track down their RSS feed. Alas, all I could find was a post in one of their forums from someone else (hi Malcolm) looking for the same thing.

The response from Lunarpages was that they don't intend to introduce feeds for their news. Strange, but fair enough. That was all the excuse I needed to start fiddling about with some PHP to try and "scratch the itch". The basic idea being to write a page that when requested causes the following to happen on the server.

  1. Download the first page of the forum that lists all the top level posts.
  2. For each post on that page, download the linked page that includes the content of the post and any follow ups.
  3. Extract the title and content of each post, the name of the author and the date of posting.
  4. Use all that information to create the appropriate XML for the feed and serve it up to my news reader

A Simple Javascript Debug Console

Much better than using the alert() statement all over the place. Use this debug() function instead.