Re: News Feed: PHP/Postgresql Advocacy

On Feb 17, 2004, at 4:45 AM, Robert Treat wrote:

> Wow, very cool David.

Thank you! I am far from an XML expert but with so many friends on the 
php pear
development team it was just a 7  hours job :D

> This is something we have talked about having before,
> and we seem so close now I think we need to find a way to make it 
> happen.
> David, I noticed your news feed points to us19 rather than the main 
> server...
> just curious if there was any reason why?

Egoism ;) ?? Kidding of course.

I am not sure how this might effect the load on the main 
www.postgresql.org for one.
if someone adds the rss feed to his site, he might  hit the server 
every hour or every 30 minutes. Many news aggregators, which are now 
default
in a number of CMS like Postnuke, Drupal, Phpnuke, Slashcode do that 
and you need to be careful if you have
some limits on the server traffic.

The second reason is because this is not something official and I 
didn't want to bother anyone.

> I am thinking if we could set up
> www.postgresql.org/news.rss we could make that a public news feed that 
> folks
> could pull from.

Sure, I am ready anytime but I would like to further explain: I am 
currently parsing the news from our mirror, adding the news on the 
database
and then I manipulate the news for the feed. This is not the normal way 
to do it. Assuming that the news are already in a database, one of my 
scripts might
not be required on the official site.

Secondly, I think we need to provide a number of feeds aka news and a 
feed for each of the main mailing lists.

>  It would also be included in the mirror system if someone
> needed to pull a local feed (though it would be slightly delayed).   
> The only
> question I would have is how does this fit in with the web code 
> rewrite /
> translation stuff?

I am not sure. For the time being you can use our "alpha" feed url. 
Talking about advocacy, I think that the feeds are a great tool.

The second easy to implement feature is the ip to country. This will 
display, on the download page, something like this " We detected that 
you are from
$country"  example http://www.php.net/my.php

Advantage? this will enhance the overall browsing and download 
experience. Visitors in Austria will hit the local mirror with a better 
performance
and less load on the main box.

Eventually I am not suggesting a quick adoption of these tools. I will 
keep working on these features and if there is an interest for official 
adoption, I am here
to help as always.

All the best,
David Costa


> Robert Treat
>
> On Monday 16 February 2004 19:27, David Costa wrote:
> > Hello Everyone :)
> >
> > It was a long day but I managed to finalise a newsfeed from the
> > postgresql.org website.
> >
> > You can see it at http://www.dotgeek.org/ on the right column
> >
> > As you might now, XML Feeds, made available under the rdf/rss format
> > are a tremendous tool. O'Reilly on lamp is using this extensively
> > http://www.onlamp.com/ to aggregate news from several sources. They
> > would certainly add some news from postgresql and I am sure that many
> > of the postgresql users will be more than glad to add the news
> > in their website.
> >
> > Basically everyone with a website and an rss parser can add the
> > postgresql.org news anytime using our raw feed  at
> > http://www.dotgeek.org/pgnews/news.rss
> >
> > The news are first parsed, then stored on a postgresql database in our
> > server. For the feed I used PHP, Pear XML_Serializer, and a custom RSS
> > parser.
> >
> > On the next few days we will move on as planned adding a column at
> > dotgeek entirely dedicated to  PHP&PostgreSQL development.
> >
> > The first articles will be written by me and Hans-Jürgen Schönig.
> >
> > The next ideal step could be XML feeds for the mailing lists.
> >
> > Oh.. of course if Marc or Dave would like to see/try the sources for 
> > an
> > official adoption, all yours, not urgent thou.
> >
> > 1:25 AM here, time to go home. I will keep you posted on my Advocacy
> > initiatives, hope you don't mind ;)
> >
> > All the best,
> > Regards
> > David Costa
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ---------------------------(end of 
> > broadcast)---------------------------
> > TIP 9: the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if 
> > your
> >       joining column's datatypes do not match
>
> --
> Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL


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