I’ve been looking into adding Reddit support to Feeddit and I thought I’d share a bit of code that I whipped up.
Whilst investigation how to get a similar system as the digg categories on feeddit for reddit using the unoffical API, I ran into an issue.
Unlike Digg, Reddit’s categories system is user generated, with subreddits, which doesn’t have a nice way of getting an xml file of all the subreddits, so using hpricot I made this little script to scrap http://reddit.com/reddits and return a nice xml doc of all of them.
Last time I ran this it found 13,100 subreddits, which makes for a very large xml file!!
I’ve decided against using this code in production, infavour of the user entering the name of the subreddit they wish to subscribe to but it’s still pretty cool, and could be useful for anyone looking to do some screenscraping in ruby or how to build xml.
It’s hosted on github so feel free to fork and improve it as you see fit too.
It’s been pretty quiet on the blogging front for a while now here, so I thought I’d do a bit of an update.
Last year I had been working at Econsultancy, rebuilding their website, which I blogged about when it was relaunched just before christmas.
About a week after the launch I was made redundant from there, essentially they had employed me in a permanent position for contract work and had no plans to keep me around after I had finished the site, which sucks, and to drop this news on me 3 days before christmas just compounded the suckage.
Since then I had been avoiding doing any kind of web development because I felt really quite despondent.
Then along came Rawnet
Last week I started a new job at Rawnet in Windsor, it’s quite a change from what I have been doing previously as rawnet is a full service digital agency, building websites for clients.
My role is a kind of all rounder; doing html, css, photoshop, ruby and rails. The team there are really friendly and have made me feel right at home, they build some awesome sites for some big name brands; AT&T Williams, Honda, Cable And Wireless and Canon.
It’s quite a different way of working from previous jobs I’ve done, going from seemingly never ending projects with incredibly vague specifications to a tightly run ship, each project is planned and specced out and then properly managed so everyone is always in the know, it’s taking a bit of getting used to but is an big improvement.
It’s also the first time I’ve had to do any sort of time tracking, using the website Tickspot, I’m using a desktop app called Timepost which integrates very nicely with tick, highly recommended if you have to do any time tracking.
I’m also driving to work every day as I’m still living in London and the office is in the centre of Windsor, which is a nice change. I found that commuting on the tube every day can be tiring and really demoralizing, especially on the crowded trains in the morning.
Going in the car costs a little more but it means I can listen to my own music in a nice air conditioned comfortable seat door to door and it takes about the same amount of time as travelling across London during the rush hour!
Reinvigorated
Now I’m back in the zone, I’m working on bumble to replace wordpress on teabass and give me a platform to mix in all my other web activities into one place, updating feeddit to add support for reddit, trying my hand at a little iPhone development when I get the time and teaching myself how to cook more complex things than heating a pizza in the oven.
I’ve decided to close down http://ticketapp.com, there is very little activity on it now, I and most of the other regular users have moved to using twitter.
Plus I had to rebuild the server it was on after it was compromised (don’t worry your data is safe)!
This gives me time to focus on the current improvements I’m making to bumble for the next generation of Teabass.com and the new server (wilberforce2) is nicely setup for quick deployments with github and passenger so I can get my work out in public quicker.
I have a backup of the site running locally so if anyone would like their tickets I can export them into a number of different formats, just drop me an email or message me on twitter.
About
Teabass is the blog of Andrew Nesbitt, a Developer and Designer based in London, UK.
