June 22, 2009

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Amy Gahran asked me some questions and wrote up some of the background, mostly technical, for the Iran filter.

Extra context, for nerds only: There’s a bit of screen scraping involved, and for that I used Hpricot, an almost-magical Ruby HTML-parsing library, and Sinatra, a definitely-magical Ruby web framework. They make it easy to create useful micro-feeds — for instance, http://iran.robinsloan.com/nytlede, which tells me when the newest NYT Lede entry was updated — information that’s not included in the RSS feed.