A general note about feed technology. The reason FeedLand is syntax-agnostic is because of an open source package for Node.js called feedparser that I built on. It understands and flattens out the names in RSS, Atom and RDF feeds. I am thankful for not having to deal with feeds at that level.#
The first layer I built on top of the package hid some complexity in its API that imho is only necessary if you're like Google with an array of 100K systems reading a million feeds every minute. #
Five years later, as part of the FeedLand project, I added another layer, because I don't want a stream of items with data about the feed packed into each item, I want to read the feed and get a JavaScript object with everything neatly organized, with all the info from the feed in the object. As simple as possible. Factored and factored again. #
It's all in a package called reallySimple. It's the code that FeedLand uses to read feeds, and it works pretty flawlessly as far as I can tell, and it's hell on wheels performance-wise.#
This is what the JavaScript object looks like, for the NYT's theater feed. Tell me if you think it's fast. I certainly do. #
Anyway -- I hope people use reallySimple. It really does make feed reading in Node as easy as reading a JSON file. #
Last update: Thursday October 27, 2022; 8:26 PM EDT.
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