I've pretty well finished working on my scripts for RSS feeds. I know it probably would have been a lot easier to just use an rss aggregator but it was kinda fun figuring out how to do it with perl. Kinda. The only problem I'm not sure I dealt with is when a feed is unavailable, it causes an error. The first time it happened I was going through my scripts trying to find out what the hell went wrong because it was working fine five minutes earlier. I wrote some code to catch the error and just skip feeds that don't work, but I don't know if it actually works. The feeds should refresh when the html file is older than one hour. The entertainment and news ones have basically nothing in them, I was just using them to test stuff.

So I just need to tweak some things and add more feeds. And sleep. I really need to go to sleep.

Update: nope, the script still crashes if the rss page fails to load. Damn, I'll have to work on that. I think I know where I went wrong. I only checked to see if it got the feed, but the problem probably occured when it tries to parse the faulty xml. Hopefully the parsing routine returns false [0] if it fails and I can use that to skip to the next feed. I hope. Nope, that still didn't help! Damn. Loading the bad xml url, I get "An invalid character was found in text content." Mmmmm, how to get around this?