The end of my Feedfeeder story

Another post about Plone... but this time about me and not about Plone.

For about 18 months I have wrestled with consuming broken RSS feeds to pick up image of the day fields stipulated by customers. These are feeds so broken that no RSS parser, including the masterful Feedparser, can handle them (for example, one image of the day feed usually puts the image in the RSS header and changes that each day - no history is maintained). They aren't actually RSS, they just possess a file name that ends with '.rss'. Plus, periodically the way they are written changes so custom logic fails.

I have forked Reinout van Rees FeedFeeder project, and even proposed complicated logical revisions to handle broken these broken feeds and their shifting implementation. I called it Feedfeeder v2. Reinout always seemed hesitant, and I watched as other people extended on his work and despaired. I knew something was wrong but couldn't put my finger on it. I hesitated to work on it, even though funding for it was readily available.

Then between Spacebook, Pinax, and other efforts I shelved this effort for months, hiding my head in the virtual sand. And yet I knew it needs to be addressed. How could I handle something that broke the otherwise wonderful Feedparser?

During Pycon 2009 I came up with the answer. I took an excellent tutorial on html scraping and learned lots of little tricks to reinforce my skills with BeautifulSoup. You see, screen scraping is a secret pleasure I have. Scraping out a bit of data from a page is like a little puzzle. When I talked about this to someone, in the middle of my discussion with them the answer became clear as day.

The answer was to turn the problem from a RSS interpretation problem to a simple web page scraping puzzle.

1. Fetch via urllib the XML file that pretends to be RSS.
2. Parse it using BeautifulSoup or html5lib.
3. Get all the images listed.
4. Discard all but the largest image.
5. Guess out the meta-data from the XML file and store that for the image.

Problem solved.

Now I just need to make a Plone 3 package to do this for me and my angst is finished.

My apologies Reinout for the time spent on trying to cook a solution via Feedfeeder. Thank you for your insights and your extreme patience. I think you tried to tell me to take a different path.