I swear, I'm surrounded by people who want to watch me waste my time. I was telling the Purdue Linux Users Group about the wonders of RSS and how grea

Playing Bad Apple over RSS

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2024-11-12 18:30:04

I swear, I'm surrounded by people who want to watch me waste my time. I was telling the Purdue Linux Users Group about the wonders of RSS and how great it is, but my friend overheard the conversation and said, jokingly, "You should do Bad Apple, over RSS". I whined, complained, claimed it would be "too easy" and that "I need a harder project". Alas, my harder projects have remained stagnant for a few weeks now, eschewed for schoolwork.

The moment that I heard "Bad Apple" and "RSS" in the same sentence, I thought of big feed that contains every frame as a feed entry. But that would be cheating, so my alternative plan formed fairly quickly: an RSS feed, that, every time it is requested, will update to show a new frame. Writing the backend to generate the RSS feed was pretty easy. All I needed was to keep track of a query parameter and link that against an integer representing the frame, using PHP's APCu cache as a basic key/value store.

There seems to be a bug where the first frame shows up twice, but I don't care enough to figure out why that happens. All that matters is that it works. Now I just need to patch a feed reader to request the RSS feed 30 times a second...