WeirdLooking.com: Michael Barton's Blog

broken gmail feeds

Michael Barton — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 18:53:29 +0000

Gmail provides Atom feeds of your inbox, but they come at a price. And the price is the possibility of having to deal with them. Mine kept causing an error in RSS Bandit. At first I tried to blame the aggregator, but then I took a closer look at the feed itself…

<entry>
  ...
  <modified>2006-09-03T24:56:06Z</modified>
  <issued>2006-09-03T24:56:06Z</issued>
  ...
</entry>

That email was received at nearly 25 o’clock, eh? The interesting part is, it came in at 1am on the third (GMT). So not only is it an invalid date, it’s off by 24 hours. I guess they just forgot to mod the hour by 24 or something.

I submitted a bug to Google, and they promptly replied with an automated message! It seems they aren’t able to respond directly to my report, but they are working on these issues. I know I feel better about it ever getting fixed.

So what I did was, I built myself a little proxy script that fixes the time. I still need to make it pass through the cache headers, but I’m a bit lazy for that right now. See, they’re forcing me to waste their bandwidth.

<?php
  if (!isset($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']))
  {
    header('WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="My Realm"');
    header('HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized');
    echo 'You are NOT authorized.';
  }
  else
  {
    header('Content-type: text/xml');
    $ch = curl_init("https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_UNRESTRICTED_AUTH, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_ANY);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'].':'.$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW']);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    echo preg_replace('/(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}T\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}Z)/e',
      'str_replace(\'T24:\', \'T01:\', \'$1\')', curl_exec($ch));
  }
?>

hurricane season's a-comin'...

Michael Barton — Thu, 11 May 2006 12:42:24 +0000

And I’d rather not be surprised again. Since I rarely watch the news, I tend to hear about hurricanes when it’s time to evacuate. Last year, I tried watching the National Hurricane Center's RSS feed. Is anyone actually subscribed to this thing? The NHC posts about 86,000 items per day, and they look like this:

ABNT20 KNHC 010315
TWOAT
TROPICAL WEATHER OUTLOOK
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
1030 PM EST WED NOV 30 2005
FOR THE NORTH ATLANTIC…CARIBBEAN SEA AND THE GULF OF MEXICO…
THE NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER IS ISSUING ADVISORIES ON TROPICAL
STORM EPSILON… LOCATED OVER THE CENTRAL ATLANTIC ABOUT 700 MILES
…

…I’d rather be hit by a hurricane. What I’d like is a feed of the headlines: new storms and major changes in landfall predictions, nothing else. I’ve searched a lot and can’t really find anything along those lines.

Maybe some news site will emerge with optimal hurricane story density after we get our first storm. Or maybe I can scrape the important bits out of NHC alerts. I don’t know.

But I’m looking forward to another evacuation.

atom enabled-ing

Michael Barton — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 07:38:12 +0000

Does anyone know of an Atom equivalent to <wfw:commentRss> and/or <slash:comments>?

I have read that this should work for comment threads, but no luck (at least not in my reader):
<link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="" />