So I’m in two fantasy football leagues this year. One is the office league, which hasn’t drafted yet, and only has five teams signed up so far. The other league, with Rob and some other friends, we did a live draft yesterday, with the big board and everything - kudos to Mikey for setting that whole thing up.

Anyway, since I don’t really know that much about football, and I didn’t want the rest of the crew to figure that out, I started poking around yesterday morning, and putting together a list of people I’d look into getting - the obvious ones like Tom Brady or Ladanian Tomlinson, down to wideouts who might be around in the tenth round - all together it was about 50 or 60 names, most of whom I figured I’d never get.

Rather than write this down like a chump, I was going to email it to myself and read it on my phone. But that wouldn’t allow me to remove players when they were drafted, so instead I spent the next hour to two coming up with this. It’s a quick little web app - 68 lines of code and one database table with 3 columns. You can’t add anything, or re-sort the list, basically all you can do is look over the options and delete things. It’s ugly and has no security at all, but it worked on my phone, and you bet your ass that thing helped my draft.
I turned off the deleting for the moment, because it would all be gone the first time Dustin or Rob looked at it if I didn’t. I also re-imported some of the data from before the draft, so you can see it with more data intact (I think about 6 of my original ranked players didn’t get picked, and thus weren’t deleted).

Neat little application, through, in my admittedly biased opinion, and with a little bit of work I could use it as a general-purpose to-do list, particularly for shopping lists and the like. At the very least, I’m going to plug more data in there and use it for the work draft next week.

I upgraded WordPress to 2.2.1. The upgrade process is almost as easy as the installation process, although in the process of deleting and replacing everything I noticed that WordPress has an awful lot of files. Also, I deleted the wp-config file, so I had to try to remember the connect string. The DB name and login, I found in PHPMyAdmin, but the password was nowhere to be found. I ended up creating a new user and just adding that one.

Also: Akismet, which I installed on April 11th, a little over 3 months ago, has blocked 1,012 spam comments. I don’t have what you’d call a “high-traffic”, or “popular”, or even “good” blog, so that’s really a sign that spammers are starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel. To Akismet’s credit, I’ve never gotten any false positives out of it, and it’s only let 6 or 7 junk comments through. They were all of the “generic comment text, but with an ad-laced domain squat in the URL” variety. I can’t blame Akismet for not blocking a comment with a random Yeats quote as the text, and congress-site.com (something like that, anyway - just as well if I got it wrong, since I don’t want to give them the free advertising) as the URL.

Finally, I’m ready to officially call Blogosphorum a failure. There are a number of small problems with it right now - character encoding, the cron job not firing,  XML parsing being patchy at best - and I just can’t be fucked to fix them. It’s still up, and I’ll go back and re-visit the idea at some point, but for now I’m sick of looking at it. I still think it’s a solid concept, and it could be really great if I put in the hours to make it work 100%, but for right now, I’m just going to stop working on it or talking about it.

Becki and I went to the Columbia mall last night, and while we were there we stopped in the Apple store to play with a couple of iPhones. After five minutes or so of screwing around with the thing, I sated my gadget-lust with it, and also decided that I’m glad I don’t own one. I’ll be comparing the $600 iPhone to my $100 Motorola Q, throughout.

It’s long, so here’s a jump/cut/break.

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UPDATE: Sometime over the weekend, I broke the stupid import script. I guess I have some more motivation to fix it now.

Some work on the RSS/Forum hybrid, over the past week:

• Added mod_rewrite support, for pretty little hyperlinks like this one. Shockingly painless, that one, but then these are very simple RewriteRules.
• Renamed project from boring “RSS Forum” to utterly retarded “Blogosphorum”. There’s a WordPress tag for it now, as well, so you’ll always remember why I’m not in marketing.
• Added grouping for forums, so they’re sorted a little better now.
• Added “first page” and “last page” links to thread navigation.
• Threads are culled after 2 weeks now, instead of 30 days. Older threads don’t get that much traffic anyway, and I’m not crazy about the amount of wasted processing. On a related note, the fetch data script is crap, and I need to re-build it. Also there are some character encoding issues. Yarg.
• Learned that it’s actually my own damn fault that WordPress threads are truncating. Not that I’ve fixed it, but I know it’s my fault. See above for notes on fetch data script.
• Finally, the big news: Added ability to reply to threads from the forums. Setting it up to work with WP blogs was pretty trivial (duplicate form fields and form action - the only hard part is parsing the orignal article to pull out the post id). Gawker’s system was anything but. To elaborate, the Gawker system requires:
  • Make post request to page, with valid username and password, via cURL.
  • Parse response, pull out four cookies, out of about ten that it returns. There are some duplicate keys, as well, so you have to be careful to pull the correct value for each.
  • Send another post request, again via cURL, with those cookies and the actual comment text.
• Happy news: I was going to go through and make the CSS/XHTML validate, then found out that it already did. Exception: I don’t control anyone else’s content, so the feed content might not validate. Everything I wrote does, though. Not even any warnings. Pretty nice.

Thank god for Live HTTP Headers, or that Gawker thing never would have worked. Also thank god for cURL, which is about a million times faster than trying to use fsockopen. Even with such excellent tools to draw on, it took about 3 hours to get the thing working. Live HTTP Headers, in particular, is what made this possible. That would have been completely fucking impossible without being able to see the HTTP traffic real-time. If you are serious about web app development, install it, and also FireBug, right now.

All in all, this is turning into a fun little project. Once I get the XML parsing in a less-horrible state, I think I’ll be ready to add more feeds to it, and start wailing on the thing properly. I’m also considering offering a user control panel, so users can log in and pick from the overall list of feeds, to pare it down to just what they want. It adds a bit of ownership to the process, so you aren’t stuck just reading what I want to read.

Hello and welcome to a post about my weekend project. Because I’m an uncreative dork, the name pretty much gives away what it is and what it does, but here’s some more words:

RSS Forum is the result of my thinking that “the blogosphere” (ugh) is really just a discussion forum, spread out across the entire internet. Someone makes a post on their blog, and some people show up and reply to it. Extrapolated a bit: blogs are forums, blog posts are threads, and comments are posts. Why not consolidate that, and save myself some clicking.

Thus: http://www.failurecasca.de/forums

More after the jump.

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