Got a short e-mail today about my StarDate Converter:
Have you considered making the current stardate available via RSS?
Hmm, interesting. First of all I’d have to translate the calculator to PHP or whatever to do the calculations on the server, but after that making the output available via RSS would be easy enough.
But would it be practical: the second decimal place represents a period of little over five minutes, so if someone wanted this to create a stardate ‘clock’ they’d be hitting my server at least that often. Not a disaster on its own but something that would need keeping an eye on if it proved popular.
Maybe I should test it out with the French Revolutionary Calendar first (I really need to convert that to PHP anyway so that the dates on this blog aren’t reliant on JavaScript). Hmmm, let’s see where this leads.
You know, until you mentioned it, I hadn’t realised I’d not enabled javascript on your site. But now I’ve got my glorious revolution days back. Aaah….
If you’re going to output RSS from PHP I can recommend the RSSWriter class from http://usefulinc.com/rss/rsswriter/ . Saved me no end of time a couple of weeks ago when I needed to churn out some RSS quickly.