An old friend

In an ongoing effort to keep both friends and people who don't really care up to date with what I and the family have been up to lately, I decided to take my wife and my website, michaelandfelicia.com, and turn it from a place were four year old content went to die and make it a one stop shop for following us and our life. Frankly, I would have liked to have used FriendFeed with a custom URL for this, but since it's been bought by Facebook and seems to have been left out to pasture, I decided that a roll your own solution may be just the ticket. Though to be fair, roll your own is a bit of an overstatement.

So, to that end, I dug out and brushed off an old friend, FileNET WCM 5.1, or more specifically eGrail. It may have needed a bit of dusting and removal of a small amount of bit rot, but once it got it back up and running, it felt and still feels like home. I do have to admit, that it has taken me a bit of time to remember all the old tricks, but even after almost 10 years, the software seems as good as ever.

I often wonder what would have happened if FileNET would have kept working on it ....

Anyway, I decided to take the old syndication module out for a spin and so far it seems to be working just great. I already have it pulling in feeds from Twitter and Blogger. Not sure the other feeds I'll pull in, but if it has RSS, then it's fair game as far as I'm concerned.

So far the only real issue I've seen is that WCM seems to expect a single article per XML file. That meant I have to preprocess the feeds using Java, but I had to do something to download the data anyway, so it does seem l be working out. As soon as it's ready, I'll post a link.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad