25 March 2009

People do go both ways

Scarecrow: people do go both waysThere is a scene depicted in the movie: 'Battle of the Bulge' (1965) about the 1944 attempted German breakout offensive through the Ardennes, where German commandos are tasked with and shown changing road signs to confuse Allied troops

When I started this blog, it was in response to a desire to make the CentOS internals a little more transparent to interested observers. We at the project do get the questions, and I think a thoughtful reader can pull connections from the little stories and examples I choose from the full breadth of the blog. While I might 'tag' something specifically 'CentOS', real life has no such natural boundaries, and these are just guide markers in the channel of life. confused highway sign

I added the blog into the CentOS aggregator at planet.centos.org, and set to writing. I cribbed the configs from an example of another CentOS member. I tried then to restrict the feed to the 'CentOS' label, but following the documentation just did not work. I settled for the default full feed, and resolved to solve the revisit the matter later

My friend toracat gently reminded me of the need to finish the job, this morning. Sigh ... back to wrestling markup

The example follows [there are annoying line breaks in the blog layout as rendered, and indeed in the doco upstream that need to be pasted back together, mentally]. Can you spot the error?

Full site feed:
  • Atom 1.0: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
  • RSS 2.0: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feed/post/default?alt=rss
  ...
Label-specific site feed:
  • Atom 1.0: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default/-/labelname
  • RSS 2.0: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?alt=rss/-/labelname
  ...
Individual post comment feed:
  • Atom 1.0: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/postId/comments/default
  • RSS 2.0: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/postId/comments/default?alt=rss

There is the obvious need to s/comments/posts/g, but more is needed. I am accustomed to 'magic CGI directories' that accept variables. I use them myself. See, e.g., the expanded URL to the thumbnail of Mothra which is not just an image, but the filename, and a link to the full size one. No express CGI script is called out, as the index file for that directory is actually a smart CGI script

Mothra

Enough clues, and on to the answer. I put bit of text around the answer so your eyes do not pick it out. The text at the fourth bullet above is malformed ... the part following: alt=rss needed to precede the question mark marker that identified the start of variables to the CGI script. We move before it the part: /-/labelname and add the desired label. Now a custom subfeed chosen by label is properly specified

But there are no road signs on the Blogger provided doco page to permit easily reporting errors, so that they might have be fixed

NutsAnthony McAuliffe