Spotlight / Meta data importer

L

laurris

Registered
Hello,

I am working on a metadata importer for RSS feeds.
The idea is to include feed titles in spotlight search. When you click on a result it should show the related item in Safari (or other newsreeder).
If some developers are interested in this project, please let me know below.

Note: I have problems dealing with XML parsing (asynchronous) in the GetMetadataForFile() function.
 
That probably isn't a good idea, at least not the way RSS and Spotlight work. If you were to do it, I'd recommend creating an RSS application first, that brings in the RSS information, save each RSS post as a separate file, and create a plug in for Spotlight that tells it how to interpret the data, then when it is double clicked, it will open the file in the application you wrote. Having RSS just show up in Spotlight seems like a bad cludge to me, if thats all there really is to it.

I think it would just be better to build an RSS Application with Spotlight to create smart groups of articles from your RSS feed. I'm sure there is a lot of stuff in the OS that would make this reasonably painless, and if you do it right, it could easily be better then Safari RSS. I liked Safari RSS, but I found it pretty limiting. If you did a search across too many RSS Feed, it seem to not show anything up at all, and would occassionally crash if too many were open.
 
You are right, and this is the conclusion I made when I started to work on a RSS metadata importer after posting this.
The problem (feature ?) with Spotlight is that in its logic :
1 item of information = 1 file.
I finally did what you suggest with NetNewswire (Feed reader) and an Applescript. The script splits the rss channel in multiple <items> and writes each <item> in a file with a XSLT reference in the XML header.
Then files can be searched with spotlight (thanks to a special importer) and opened with Safari 2.0 witch reads XML and XSLT.
This way, I can search a word inside an item in Spotlight and open it in Safari with a nice display.
Problem: with Applescript, you can' t set the UTI (I don' t know how) so you are not sure that the file will be opened with Safari. There is certainly a way to achive but for the moment I am still looking for.
 
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