philwilson.org

Well, after making my last brave post, I realised that FeedOnFeeds natively supports the dc:subject element and stores it in its database already. Hurray.

Or not, really. Because what it actually supports is a single dc:subject per feed item, which it just drops straight into a text field. If you have multiple subjects per item, say:

<dc:subject>Semantic Web</dc:subject>
<dc:subject>Programming</dc:subject>

Then what you end up with in your database is this:

Semantic WebProgramming

Which isn’t terribly useful at all. So, I can change the existing functionality to iterate and insert spaces and stuff, but what do I do with the existing 5,500 items in my database which already have tags associated with them? (crikey, that’ll teach me to subscribe my del.icio.us inbox) Clearly, I could write a script which looks for capital letters in the middle of words and inserts a space before it, but then you fall into the problem where things are tagged with acronyms like FOAF (which I still have trouble pronouncing in conversation, by the way), and plain ol’ typos.

“Bah” I say.