I took a good deep look at one of the datasets I'm meant to be linking up today. Actually, it's four separate datasets, but all held within the same database. I poked around a bit, and found this:

I'm currently at this year's dev8D.

After a project meeting today, it was suggested that I keep a note of all of the "interesting" issues that I encounter with the various data repositories I encounter on the project. So, here's the first of them.

At least two of our repositories consist of custom-built applications. One of them is a fairly large piece of PHP, backed by a MySQL database. The PHP for this repository is complex, and only understood by one person. The database schema is also fairly cryptic, and almost entirely undocumented. To make matters worse, the web user interface implemented by the PHP is actually a GUI, developed with (I think) Google Gears. The only way of querying this data store through an alternative interface is to access the database directly¹.

After some struggling over the last couple of days to sort out tag-based blog aggregator filtering in Drupal, here's how I did it, with the extra patches and sub-modules I needed to make it work.

... the sound of blog filtering through the percolator.

I've been putting together a website for my current work project, in Drupal, and wanted to aggregate items from many blogs, filtered by keyword on the item's tags. Now, Drupal's default Aggregator module doesn't do this. The News Page module seems to offer the feature, but I couldn't get it to display any blog posts, which was rather a shame. I eventually wound up with the FeedAPI modules.

I'm playing with Drupal, to see how I can aggregate RSS news items with particular tag keywords from several sources into a single place. It seems that the Drupal Aggregator module doesn't do that, but that the News Item plugin can be used to make it work.

This post is more of a test of that mechanism, than actually saying anything interesting. :)