[drats_users] D-RATS RSS Feeds

[Barry A. Wilson]

Dan,

   It's awesome that you share all your hard work with the rest of us.  I
don't know what your vision is with the D-RATS program because I just joined
this group and D-STAR is pretty new to me. I don't think it prudent to try
to load down D-STAR with data feeds already developed for other systems like
the NOAA Weather feed. We already have EMWIN which is available to parse out
weather data from the National Weather Service tailored to your individual
needs. 

    I actually use the program InterWarn by Storm Alert Inc. which does
pretty much the same for the weather feeds as does RealEMWIN. Since these
programs already make the data available via radio, users could adapt those
programs to meet their own needs. Perhaps users could just use the output of
one of these programs to parse out local severe storm and weather related
warning via D-STAR... but again we already have EMWIN and NOAA Weather
Radios!

    I for one would rather see you using your energy in perfecting chat,
message and file transfers in the D-STAR arena. Perhaps including forward
error correcting, multiple message addressees etc. I know you have the
Colorado D-STAR Group on the edge of our seats with every release checking
out and testing your software. I really like your position look up
feature... I just haven't been able to get the program to see my AirCard GPS
data feed because the port speed doesn't appear to be configurable to
different rates on different COM ports.

    I have also caught wind of something called CHIRP but couldn't find it
anywhere. Is this a program which will allow transfer of programming data
between and IC-92AD and other D-STAR radios>

Thanks again for all that you do,

Barry
KA0BBQ

-----Original Message-----
From: drats_users-bounces at lists.danplanet.com
[mailto:drats_users-bounces at lists.danplanet.com] On Behalf Of Dan Smith
Sent: Sunday, October 05, 2008 4:07 PM
To: Discussion of D-RATS
Subject: Re: [drats_users] D-RATS RSS Feeds

> However if I try to pull down some other feeds that are a bit more
> complex then I get some mixed results.

Replace "complex" with "broken".

Many RSS feeds put only a link to the actual story that they want,
instead of the actual content.  Some RSS readers can handle this by
fetching the linked page and rendering it appropriately.

> Is D-RATS meant to pass the entire RSS feed (which I would hope)? I
> might be wrong, but I thought that it would basically treat the content
> in a similar fashion to Broadcast Text File.

The reason I added CAP feeds are because they always have the entire
content in the feed.  I will add a function to let you select that you
want to fetch the <link> for the content.  However, some pages
(especially NOAA ones) link to a huge page with all the alerts, instead
of a single page with just the specific alert in question.  Those will
be nearly impossible to make work, so it would be good to try to figure
out an alternate source.

> BTW, up until recently it was possible to edit the contents of an Auto
> QST message by clicking on it and making the change.  It appears in b5
> (and this probably occurred a few versions ago) that you can no longer
> edit a QST message and that you have to manually add a new one, then
> delete the old one, which is a bit of a pain :)

Yep, hence the "(which isn't finished yet)" in the beta release mail :)

I want that box to be more powerful in the future, as you can tell from
the per-type widget at the bottom of the box.  With power, comes
complexity, which requires time :)

-- 
Dan Smith
dsmith#danplanet.com, s/#/@/
www.danplanet.com
KK7DS
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