Projects of Pain
Alligratormx
AlligratorMX is a Flash MX-based RSS news reader client. It relies on PHP to fetch the newsfeeds (to overcome cross-domain security features of Flash), but it performs parsing of the RSS feed in Actionscript.
| Project Name | Source | Preview |
|---|---|---|
| AlligratorMX v0.90b | n/a | here |
The PHP RSS fetcher performs a Last-Modified check to see if the newsfeed has changed since it was last read. Although not finished yet, this feature will be used to implement a cache mechanism. This will prevent AlligratorMX from being a "dumb" newsreader that re-loads the same newsfeed every 5 minutes when there is no need. This will reduce the chances of encountering this following problem at Slashdot:
"Due largely to the absolutely ridiculous amount of abuse we get on a daily basis from poorly implemented headline readers, we were forced to implement a much more liberal automated banning system on RSS/RDF headline reading applications. Our policy is to allow one request every 30 minutes. We'll allow a few more before you will get banned, and we are more flexible still with proxy servers. However, in many cases, we have no choice but to ban abuse.
You should still be able to access the rest of the website, just not the .rss, .rdf, and .xml pages.
You have 2 options: First is to stop beating the crap out of our servers, and just wait a few days/hours. Depending on the severity of the abuse, you should be back in a couple of days. If, after 72 hours, you are still banned, please Email banned@slashdot.org and ask for help. Please include the approximate time of the ban, the MD5 that the ban message told you to tell us, and what you think your IP number is.
If you have reason to believe you're connecting through a proxy server, please mention that too -- and you might need to have your proxy server's admin contact us instead of you."
By performing the Last-Modified check, the newsreader doesn't actually fetch the document at first, so it bypasses this problem fairly effectively.
I made this some time ago (probably a year ago) and shelved it after a bit of intense development. I am planning to get back to it when I have some more time. For now, feel free to check it out.