News

Fortunes via RSS

Von Joey Schulze, 18.6.2006
After several years of collecting fortune cookies it is now possible to receive fortunes via several RSS feeds.

Technology to provide recently added fortune cookies via an RDF Site Summary (RSS) feed has been developed yesterday. Controlled via cron a number of RSS feeds are created regularly. There are five feeds for singular fortune databases and three special feeds that aggregate fortune cookies from a number of databases. Interested people are free to include either of them in their own aggregators or RSS readers.

The RDF files are created by a program written in Perl that uses XML::RSS and writes fake URLs based on the MD5 sum of the fortune cookie itself, so that readers don't get confused by the same URLs. With help of Algorithm::Diff the program will only create a new RDF file if there have been changes so that readers don't have to fetch the file again all the time.