RSS (most commonly expanded as "Really Simple Syndication") is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.

So I've been working on fixing up my RSS codes so that I can automatically post to Facebook using my blog, which led me to see a lot of stupidness in the RSS specs.

Just in case you were wondering. Here's what I came up with to represent an RFC-822 compliant date string in PHP:

date("D, d M Y H:i:s T" [, $timestamp])

One of the changes I made to my parser is how smileys are handled. Whereas the old parser had a character tokenizer which made writing the logic for parsing smileys tedious to say the least, I felt it would be worth it to attempt to build an auto regex builder script.

So as none of you may now, at the core of my little framework here is a pretty sweet home grown parser, that basically spits out a DOM tree. It takes all sorts of input and turns it into pretty smileys, auto-paragraphs and more coolness. There's a few things it doesn't do too well though, so I rewrite a new parser from scratch over the past 2 days.

This section of the blog will be used as an outlet for my nerdy programming geek side. I have several pet nerd projects going on. One of which is showcased in the image you see here.

The geometric mesh you see here was obtained by subdividing a tetrahedron into increasingly smaller parts, and offsetting the resulting vertices on their normal vectors to create a sphere. A mathematical displacement function was then applied to create the ripple effect.