Python Desktop Server Weblog 29.9.2003

enclosures and the adventures when supporting them ...

The linked RSS feed contains interviews by Chris Lydon. It's a very new feed done by Dave Winer. It is broken in at least two aspects:

• it uses chr(13) (carriage-return) instead of chr(10) (linefeed) as line termination
• it reuses GUIDs! Yep, he reuses the same GUID on the continuations, too. So the Python Desktop Server filters out all but the first part, as those are already seen.

Damn. And I thought it would be just easy to write the enclosure stuff. It is easy to write - but not easy to debug, because none of the available feeds really valid and usefull.

The other feed that's linked in the verbatim documentation of the enclosure feature references enclosures that are not accessible any more.

Ok, I just assume that all this would work if the feeds would work, so if somebody uses some enclosure enabled feeds and notices some weirdness to happen, drop me a note and I try to find out who is guilty

Oh, the complete enclosure stuff is now in CVS, both weblog and aggregator support it now.

Update: Dave has fixed the duplicate-GUID problem in the Lydon feed, so there now is a quite nice feed to test enclosures with!

PyDS can now send enclosures

The Python Desktop Server can now send enclosures. This posting has added the current CVS snapshot as an example. The enclosure must be an HTTP URL, so that the Python Desktop Server can determine it's content type. The server must return both the content type and the content length. The URL is only passed on, the file isn't actually moved. So if you want to do something with enclosures, you have to first upload your file and afterwards put the URL of the file into the postings enclosure field when doing your posting.

To upload (upstream) files to your community server, just save them in ~/.PyDS/www/ or create a special directory below that (for example call it gems or something like that). Watch your event log, you will see when the file is upstreamd and will get the URL for that file there. Copy that URL to the enclosure entry field.

To activate enclosure posting, you need to go to your enclosure preferences and set it to active.