stealing from RSS Bandit

In a similar vein to my shared bookmarks experiment, an interesting application of RSS Bandit's feed upload functionality:

Again, initially I installed the program for its intended purpose: sharing my RSS/Atom feed list between multiple locations and machines. But once something gets uploaded to my server, I'm always keen to put it to some good use.

Under the program's Remote storage settings in the Options dialog, I entered relevant FTP details to a location in the web directory of my server.

After the first upload, I saw that Bandit stores its information in a ZIP archive, containing two XML files. In order to use the feedlist.xml file, I wrote a compact (and admittedly very ad-hoc) piece of PHP code that extracts the file on the fly (after checking that the archive is indeed newer than any files already extracted previously) and adds a reference to an XSLT, which changes the raw feed data into a halfway decent looking listing.

So there we have it: by choosing Upload feeds from the Tools menu, a new ZIP is sent to the server. Next time somebody accesses the feed list directory, PHP extracts the new list and sends it back to the user. If there is already an up-to-date feedlist.xml file present, the script simply pipes its contents to the user, without any further extraction/processing.

View the feed list, its related XSLT and the PHP code.

And, as a complete aside: if you hate the simple look of the RSS Bandit icon, you can change it with this new and improved icon for a laugh.