At the beginning of the week, Why the Lucky Stiff launched What a Quiet Stiff, a new wholly owned subsidiary of his popular web site. His request for people to take advantage of the RSS feed reminded me that I never got around to finding out what RSS is all about, and so I started doing some research about what it is and what kinds of RSS parsing libraries are available for Ruby.

The first stop was Chad Fowler’s Ruby/RSS module, which is probably very good but presented two immediate problems. First, it relies on yet another extension (xmlparser) for its XML parsing instead of the now-standard REXML. Second, it only works for RSS version 0.91, and Why’s RSS feed is in version 2.0 format. The next and last stop (for now) was kou’s RSS parser, which does use REXML and supports RSS 2.0 as well.

After a flurry of hacking, I managed to put together a little FXRuby-based GUI application for viewing the latest images from WAQS. After a few more touches I will probably publish it to RubyForge; it is probably a little too big to include as an example amongst the shorter (and easier-to-digest) FXRuby example programs. Watch this space for the latest developments.