27/11/2020

The archive contains older posts which may no longer reflect my current views.

# Good morning and happy Friday.

It's certainly better than yesterday: I was told that I've got to return to the office between 8th & 10th December so I've got to go back down south for the week. Let's just say I'm not looking forward to it. I'm going to drive in to work - there's no way I'm going to expose myself to the risk of up to 4 hours each day on public transport.

At least that should be the only time I need to cover until in to the new year.

# I've had an idea for creating an RSS feed that lists post sections (in my new way of working) as individual posts:

  • explode the full post content at the double @s
  • check if each section exists in custom database entries
  • if yes > ignore
  • if no > add to database with time stamp
  • build custom RSS feed from database

I imagine I'll have to create a new custom table for this to work properly and envisage emptying the table at the end of each day.

In this way I could, of a fashion, handle updated items as they wouldn't (technically) exist in the database and so be republished.

# I've got it working to automatically add new post sections to the custom table. I now just need to cycle through those sections to create a new RSS feed on the fly as I create or update posts.

# If all is well then it should not also create an RSS feed from post sections. This will be available here. Here goes nothing...

I've had to mess around with incrementing timestamps and making sure each item in the feed has a unique URL (even if it ultimately only points back to the day post) but I think I'm about there.

# I think I'll make the switch tomorrow and see how it goes. I can always revert if there are issues.

# Well, things turned out a bit more complicated than originally anticipated because of the way that the content was being parsed. To get it working correctly I've had to use apply_filters() to the content but then add a condition to stop the filter for double @s from being processed in this instance or the explode() doesn't work.

You still with me?

Now I really do think we're there.