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Facebook’s crappy RSS/Atom Feed

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We are building a new website at work using Drupal 7, and one of the requirements is integration of work’s Facebook and Twitter streams. The easiest way to do this, of course, is with the Drupal Aggregator and the RSS/Atom feeds both Facebook and Twitter provide.

The problem is, while Twitter’s RSS/Atom feed is standards compliant, Facebook’s is not, by any stretch. The main problem for us being, Facebook provides relative URLs linking to posts rather than Absolute URLs, as required by the RSS standard. The relevant part being here:

RSS places restrictions on the first non-whitespace characters of the data in <link> and <url> elements. The data in these elements must begin with an IANA-registered URI scheme, such as http://, https://, news://, mailto: and ftp://. Prior to RSS 2.0, the specification only allowed http:// and ftp://, however, in practice other URI schemes were in use by content developers and supported by aggregators. Aggregators may have limits on the URI schemes they support. Content developers should not assume that all aggregators support all schemes.

Others have also had this problem (the problem being URLs that should be “http://www.facebook.com/USER/post/xxxxxxx” turn into “http://www.mysite.com/USER/post/xxxxxxx”), and rather than resign to the fact that it’s just not going to work, I decided to spend some time to actually make it work for me.

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iDentify

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iDentify LogoTime was, my media library was populated with lots of files with inconsistent titles, and worse, TV episodes like “Showname_S01E05.mp4”. This is great if you know “episode name -> episode number”, but that usually required me to get online, and look that info up. Worse, DVD’s don’t necessarily have episodes in the same order they were aired (like, Firefly’s DVDs). The thing is, my media collection is rather large, and I REALLY didn’t want to go through and name all the episodes by hand. And it really came to a head when I bought my new AppleTV (Gen 2). So, I did some searching online, and found the answer in a software product called iDentify, by Justin Pulsipher.

One word comes to mind: genius! I could suddenly drop all my TV shows, and movies into the program, and it would look up the title, and cover art online, and rename the file using variables that I set (in my case, “Showname – SxxExx – Episode Title.m4v”. And if you/I wanted, it’d then add them to my iTunes library. It does this all extremely well, and the new version adds a few other nice touches. It adds the ability to name episodes in aired or DVD order (see Firefly comment above), and the ability (thought I haven’t tested it yet) to name files based on DVD numbering. So, using the default Handbrake naming scheme for TV series encodes, iDentify should be able to chew through those and name them appropriately.

My only complaint, and I thought it was something with iDentify, but in fact it’s an Apple issue, is you can’t have colon’s in the filename. I thought that Apple had removed this restriction, but it appears this is not the case. iDentify replaces colon’s with two asterisks. I think I’d prefer just omitting the offending character, but I’d guess there are reasons for not.

The app is extremely easy to use, and with the latest feature improvements (like being able to say which service to use for TV show lookups (I’ve had very mixed results with tagChimp, but TVDB works very well)) it’s a rock solid app. Is it worth the $9.95 that is charged for the file naming feature? Absolutely! Some people have called it crippleware, but that’s a joke. The app works great in it’s free version, it just doesn’t do renaming, which is largely what I wanted. I gladly paid the $9.95, and it is probably worth more than that.

My only real complaint, is the name. Unfortunately, the name is also a commonly used english word (that says what it does). Googling for the app name can be rather difficult because of that. The author is trying to get the app into the Mac App Store, and when that happens, I’d imagine he’ll see a significant boost in sales due to exposure.

If you have a media library (of mp4’s) that you’ve ripped from your DVD collection, and haven’t already named, or filled in metadata info for, I’d highly recommend the application. Download it, use it, love it.

[xrr rating=5/5]

“Server” is a concept, not hardware or software

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Today Apple “announced” Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” Server, and that it will seemingly be an add-on to 10.7 client. It’s basically always been this way, Apple is just finishing the job (for the last server OS X releases, you could effectively upgrade 10.x client to 10.x server by running the server essentials install).

Before we get into the post too much, let me start with an analogy that will lay a bit of the groundwork further on. Go to a restaurant and tell me the difference between your waiter, and the hostess (can’t think of a gender neutral word for this position). The hostess doesn’t bring you your food, they just seat you and maybe bring you water. But, is there really much difference between the two? Could the hostess just as easily wait tables? Or the waiter become the hostess? Sure! Or, they could even be a patron (client) and eat the food given to them by other waiters.

Since the “announcement” (I say it in quotes because basically, all that happened was marketing finally put up a page on the Apple site that acknowledges 10.7 Server will exist, in some form) the two big Apple Server mailing lists (the official one [email protected], and the Mac Enterprise list [email protected]) have been all aflutter with people going apeshit over what is and isn’t listed, the fact that it’s not a separate DVD, etc. Some of this is no doubt left over rage about Apple killing the Xserve, but really, IT people are largely FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) mongers. You think stock brokers/traders are skittish… if half the people on these lists owned any reasonable amount of Apple stock, the price would be in the news more than Linsey Lohan.

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