in Software Development |

Learning something new can be hard

Even though I have been working in software development for over 30 years, it can still be hard to learn new things. You start on a tutorial, then find you have the wrong version of something, then discover that you need to install a development kit, only to find that there is still something not working. Sigh…

Example 1: I spent some time playing with RSS Cloud recently. I was trying to access the RSS Cloud server from my shared hosting webhost, but I was unsuccessful. I was able to access it from a second cloud server. Eventually, I found out that I could not access ports above 1000 from my shared hosting. Ugh.

Example 2: I was trying to export some old WordPress websites and render them as static websites using Jekyll. However, I could not use one of the standard converters because I did not have a Ruby development kit installed. I then tried several others and finally worked around this, but I am still not there yet.  Ugh ugh.

Example 3: I have recently been following the work of Melody Kramer and the 18F team at the GSA. I thought I would take a shot a cloning a repo from their Github site and trying to rebuild the repo using Jekyll, but ran into a number of tool issues (please note I am not blaming the 18F team!). Ugh ugh ugh.

Takeaways: Nobody ever said software development was easy, sometimes you just have to keep digging…and maybe backing up and taking smaller steps.

Thanks for listening…

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Webmentions

  • Andrew Shell contacted me recently to mention that he has his rssCloud server online – nice! rssCloud uses the <cloud> element in RSS 2.0 to connect a loosely-coupled Twitter-like network of people and 140-character status messages. I went through my archives (looks like I last looked at this in 2015 and 2016) and notes, and found that I had a copy of a script (Github Gist link) Dave Winer wrote as a test app in 2015. I uploaded it to my current server, modified it to point to my current domain, and found that it was able to register with the rssCloud server and get updates on the feed listed in the test app – excellent! I plan to review the rssCloud Walkthrough document to guide my next steps.
    Resources:
    https://gist.github.com/scripting/dbb07695736de85b3882 – Dave Winer test app for Andrew Shell server
    https://blog.andrewshell.org/2020-02/18/updating-rsscloud-server/ – Update on rssCloud server
    http://rpc.rsscloud.io:5337/ – Running instance of server
    https://blog.josephscott.org/2009/09/07/rsscloud-for-wordpress/ – Info on rssCloud plugin for WordPress
    https://wordpress.org/plugins/rsscloud/ – Current plugin page for rssCloud WordPress plugin
    https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/rsscloud/ – Current SVN repo for rssCloud WordPress plugin
    http://home.rsscloud.co/ – New home page for rssCloud info
    http://walkthrough.rsscloud.co/ – Implementers Guide to rssCloud
    https://github.com/rsscloud/rsscloud-server – rssCloud server source code by Andrew Shell
    https://andysylvester.com/2015/11/22/learning-something-new-can-be-hard/ – My 2015 post on rssCloud work
    http://notes.andysylvester.com/2016/08/07/exploringRsscloudAndPubsubhubbub.html – My 2016 post on rssCloud work