Thursday, June 18, 2009

The Architectural Journal as an RSS feed

I like the The Architectural Journal, but I find the "Architecture Journal Reader" not very helpful, mainly as I just want to read it in all my other feeds (as Brian on Software has said as well) - there is no way to get an RSS feed for it - which is annoying.

and you know what happens when you annoy a programmer..

I poked around the application directory and found that JournalReader.exe.config has a string "http://files.skyscrapr.net/users/JournalReader/data/master.xml" defined as DataFeedUri


this file contains sections for each language (English, Spanish etc) and links to the RSS feed - for english it's "en/toplevel.xml"
 
And guess what, toplevel.xml is an RSS feed!
though its not updated very quickly, and none of the links are correct ;-(
In addition toplevel.xml defines a set of sections (one for each edition of the journal) which you can then get the full xml (NITF format) for each article (I had to guess the location from looking at how it references images)

so an example full path is:

http://files.skyscrapr.net/users/JournalReader/data/en/Journal18/Jour18intro.doc.xml

note that in toplevel.xml the links all point to the same place which makes the feed unusable (clicking to read the full story takes to a page about Domain-Specific Modeling every time). The other problem is that the files don't get updated at the same time of a new edition - I guess someone has to remember to regenerate and upload them....

please MS. just make this available as a working RSS feed!

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