Halogen Labs Weblog

I’ve spotted this article on XML.com, written by Steve Punte, which describes creating an online magazine with Cocoon.

The article talks about pulling content down from other web sites and RSS feeds and bringing it all together under Cocoon’s umbrella. It even showed me something the HTMLGenerator had that I didn’t know of (The copy-parameters=”true” parameter).

This seems like a fairly run-of-the-mill article, and even comes with the standard diagram of how pipelines work.

For those who regularly visit the weblog, you’ve probably noticed the site has been considerably redesigned. There are a few bugs that I still need to work out, but the general look and feel is set. Hope everybody likes it.

A few days ago, I dedcided to take the plunge and finally learn how to use Cocoon’s Flow system. I’ve read plenty about it, and sort of understood how it worked, but I hadn’t actually *made* something with it. The fruits of my exploration can be found on the Getting Started With Flow page on the Cocoon Wiki. The doc is about 75% done, so keep watching it for updates. It seems to be evolving very quickly through the help of a few other people.

Rumor has it that Cocoon 2.1-M1 will be released on Tuesday, April 29th. Despite not having an “official” roadmap of sorts, this will mark the first release of the Cocoon 2.1 branch into the world. Congratulations to everybody on the hard work!

Stefano Mazzocchi released the first public version of his software, aptly entitled Stefano’s Linotype, which seems to be some sort of blog authoring tool based on Cocoon, and Mozilla Midas. Stefano says it is fully based on the Flowscript and there is no use of databases (via cocoon-dev).

Download the distribution, and “…just add all the cocoon libraries (including scratchpad!!) from your latest CVS HEAD build into /WEB-INF/lib/ and deploy on your favorite servlet container.”

After checking out some of the code here, this looks like it would be a good example to learn flow from, aside from the super-basic examples which already come with Cocoon. As soon as I have freetime, I’m diving into this.

All I can say is, “wow”.

109 and counting..

The Cluetrain told us the web works in funny ways. Ways that organizations and companies aren’t quite used to yet. Rogue individuals inside companies have been putting up sites, and big companies sometimes show embarassing mistakes. Inside, you’ll read a story about web communities, giant news companies, normal people. You’ll also read obituaties for Dick Cheney and Fidel Castro. They haven’t died yet.
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From Ian Whitney.. I nearly peed my pants. Here’s the full text:

A message received today from Lifter Puller’s Craig Finn…

Hello Everyone-

Our friends at the Triple Rock Social Club in Minneapolis, MN are opening up a venue to make their bar just a little more ridiculous. For the first two nights they will be open (June 6 and 7), Lifter Puller will reunite to play and make sure things get kicked off correctly. We hope to do somewhat different sets each night to make it worthwhile for both night attendees, and have great openers lined up for each night already. We may or may not be adding more openers later. We hope you can make it. More details:

June 6
Lifter Puller w/ The Mountain Goats

June 7
Lifter Puller w/ The Oranges Band

I’ll be there both nights.

I’ve made a couple significant breakthroughs with my Weather RSS Feed project. I am now getting data directly from the National Weather Service, instead of through InterceptVector, who in turn gets their data from MSNBC, who in turn gets their data from the Weather Channel, who in turn gets it from the National Weather Service. Hopefully this will reduce the number of links in the chain that can go bad :)

Through my tinkering, I found a bug in Cocoon’s HTMLGenerator, and managed to get some help. The bug was patched, and I can now continue working.

Keep watching this space for news about the weather rss feeds.