WebLog Pro Olivier Berger

I’ve been investigating the use of nXml (the XML editing mode for emacs), for the production of RSS news feeds.

All I can say is that it ain’t really obvious.

I wanted to be able to produce modern RSS formats, like RSS 1.0 (RDF Site Summary 1.0), to take advantage of the extensible nature of “real XML” RDF format, or if that wouldn’t be possible RSS 2.0 (here, RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”), which seems to be XML based but less strict, maybe.

Note that I’m not an expert in all XML and RSS matters, but I feel I have sufficiant basic knowledge to guess what needs to be done. OK, maybe not, actually… so I’d welcome any comments.

nXML uses relax-ng schema to validate (and also to provide other facilities like auto-completion) the XML edited in emacs.

I tried with a RSS1.0 file containing the RDF headers… but it looks like the only schema loaded is the RDF one, which won’t help nxml understand more markup that the RDF ore namespace. I though that maybe nXml would be able to load additional namespaces, which seems to be the goal of RDF in RSS 1.0, if I get it right … but actually it seems not.

I found out after some searching that someone named Joseph Reagle produced a relax-ng schema for RSS 1.0 (announced on a post to rss-dev@yahoo group) which seems to include elements of markup for the RDF parts of RSS1.0 files… but it’s pretty minimal… so what ?

Maybe it would be possible to find a RSS 1.0 W3C schema that trang could convert relax-ng … but I couldn’t find one … too bad … or maybe it’s obvious… but I must say I don’t know enough of RDFS and other schemas…

Finally I may as well be using the RSS 2 schema (written by Dino Morelli, announced on a post on RSS2-Support@yahoo) in nXml, if such RDF cannot be handled by nXML ?

Thanks to Georges Silber who helped in this search, and mostly confirmed my findings.

Just updated amandalogp, which I hadn’t touched for long.

Amanda logs had probably been changed, and after the sysadmin upgraded amanda, my logs were no longer parseable.

Now I don’t get anymore errors, and the parsing is working again… until next upgrade ?

The modifications are in the CVS.

I’ve improved a little bit my webpages generation with Docbook XML Website. Now, there are two versions of the pages : with the “tabular” look, and with a “lighter” look, for deficient readers, printing and so on…

FYI, I’ve arranged the backend (Makefiles and so on) to have a cleaner list of directories and files.

It’s not perfect though, and I think it may be worth investigating Silkpage, which seems mainly to enhance docbook website by providing an ant generation process… although I’m no big fan of Java… so, I’ll let one of my collegues evaluate it before migrating.

Interested readers may have a look at my Makefile and layout.xml files, and follow the links to the XML and XSLT and CSS files, which should all be available although not linked by default from the pages .

Next step will probably be to generate two set of pages, with a translation in english in addition to the existing french version.