I’ve been working on two projects. Well, one project with a sub project. And I switched jobs (more soon).

I have a web app that I’ve been working on updating to be ajax’y. It is a feed reader (think Google Reader). I originally forked feedonfeeds when it was going through a period of being abandoned. It was originally written in PHP. First I made some small work flow tweaks. Then, I got sick of the feed downloader code getting stuck, so I rewrote the backend cron job in Python. I think that feedparser is more reliable than whatever the original used. I know forget what it was since I’ve since deleted it. Then I ran into issues with badly formatted HTML in the feeds causing the HTML display to go crazy, so I added in BeautifulSoup to cleanup the HTML. That fixed it for formatting, but I’m still having some issues with forms (yes, people embed those in feeds, irritatingly) interfering with each other, so there is obviously more work to be done there.

My more recent focus was replacing the frames based front-end (still PHP on the server) with more AJAX style code. That is going well, and picking up speed as I learn jQuery more, but there are plenty of rough spots, and some functionality isn’t quite on par with the frames. I’m forcing myself to use the ajax version though.

I don’t know if I will ever share the project. Currently, it is written to be single user and still has a lot of rough edges, as mentioned, so I can’t easily just make it multi-user with me hosting. I could post it for download, but it depends on postgresql, php, python, and quite a few other libraries for both so and I doubt that I’d attract anyone to try to install it. So, for the near future, it will continue to be a private project.

Perhaps once I get the UI more polished, I will replace all the PHP with Python and the CherryPy framework. Then it might start to become distributable at least.

The sub project is that I’m working on a jQuery sliding divider plugin. You can follow that here:
https://github.com/jd-boyd/jsplitdiv

The relationship to the feed reader is that frames are resizable, but divs aren’t, at least not without help. There is no reason for this not to be used plenty of places, so I put it on github.

I’m happy that when I spot check it, it pretty much works on IE 8, even though I’m not doing anything to specifically target it. I am using jQuery though, which I’m sure hides some of the possibly troublesome parts.

Anyway, since it is a project that can’t easily be shared, it is hard to write about.