Talk about making demons out of daisies: Roy Blunt (R-Missouri), the House Majority Whip, has said that the Democrats, if elected, will “plot to establish a Department of Peace, raise your taxes and minimize penalties for crack dealers”. Raising taxes sucks - but two out of three policies sound pretty good, especially when only one out of every three Americans think that the incumbent president is capable of running the country.
This story is so gloriously beautiful that I want to find the old man and shake his hand.
Yesterday, I wrote about the OPML Announcer that I’m writing. I’ve managed to write the input and output for it - I’m going to have numerous inputs - a JavaScript bookmarklet, XML-RPC and web page (I’m also hoping to work with other developers so that we can pull data in automatically from applications). The first output I’ve built is RSS 2.0. Next up is OPML. After that, it’s XML-RPC (probably using Simon Willison’s excellent Incutio XML-RPC library for PHP). I must say that PHP 5 is an excellent language for coding up stuff like this - especially because I can do it while on the train or on the upper deck of an old Routemaster bus.
We have liftoff
The first version of changes.opiumfield.com is up. I’m going to revise it quite a bit in the next week or so. Currently, it only supports entering items on the website, but this weekend I will be building and releasing the various tools that you can use - bookmarklets, XML-RPC interfaces and much more.
Eventually I will have a comprehensive API available - and the data will be available in a variety of open XML formats that you can reuse. It may look limited at the moment - but it’s going to get better and better. So start submitting your OPML files - and web pages tagged up with the OPML autodiscovery tags (I’m very liberal in what type of type attribute I accept - and if I don’t read your particular variety, just e-mail me).
