Ideas and Guidance

Hi,
OK, I will get myself upgraded to 0.7 shortly.

Once I do, I have a few things I want to try when I have some time, thought I'd run 'em by you in case you can provide any guidance before I head down inefficient or downright pointless paths.

XML and RSS
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The context for my first questions is that I am intrigued by the 'dynamic categories' that John Udell has been exploring recently. I'd love to be able to work against my posts using similar xpath expressions. And be able to facilitate other kinds of xml-based integration.

1. Let's say I want to grab xml versions of my posts out of the db - what is the easiest way to do that? I browsed the docTool for clues, looking for something like getPostAsRSS or something, but didn't see anything. What am I missing? Or do I have to build my own xml (rss) document from the dict I get from the python calls?

2. Have you ever considered alternative backend stores for PyDS? I'm not really serious about this option (at least, not doing this work myself), but just curious. My thought was, if you could use dbxml as the store, I'd be all set.

3. As a workaround, I thought I could catch change events in the pyds database, extract the info as xml and post it into a separate xml store. Any pointers on doing this? The 'react to change events' part is related to my Ping Macro question below.

4. Or maybe I should just interact with the metakit db directly? I've started poking around there, which prompted this post - I see many possible ways to get what I want, just wondering if I'm missing an obvious approach or if someone's already considered this question and various approaches already.

Ping Macro
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You may recall that I had some problems in the past getting the pingtool to work for me. My last working theory was that it might somehow be related to the combination of being on windows and using ftp upstreaming.

(Maybe 0.7 fixes it.)

Anyway, as an interim solution, I wrote a mini standalone python script that pings the places I want to notify. I run it manually after I make new posts.

Now I'd like to have it run whenever I post automatically. In general, what's the way to do this, ie, to have a custom macro run whenever a new post is made or edited? Do I want to think about a tool for this?

New Tool?
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Finally: I have another 'desktop server' of sorts, let's call it 'fooDS', that is, like PyDS, a custom localhost webserver that does some special things for me on the desktop. It is written in python. I don't know too much about its internals (yet). What I'd like to do (I think) is essentially merge fooDS into PyDS so that I have one desktop server that functions as a 'hub' for me.

There are certainly a number of possible approaches...but one that strikes me as possibly(?) the easiest/quickest, for a first pass anyway, would be to strip out the special features of fooDS and turn them into a PyDS Tool. I know I haven't given any detail on the nature of the special features of fooDS, but can you say anything in general about this approach? Is PyDS.Tool only cut out for certain kinds of functionality? What other extensibility mechanisms for server capability is there?

Sorry for such a long post, it didn't start that way.

Your thoughts appreciated,
Thanks again,
Rand