Weceem Tip: How to render items from an RSS feed

Last night I was working on a Weceem site and had cause to render some links to articles from an external RSS feed. I have a Weceem Widget node already for this “news” panel, but the RSS comes from another site. Turns out even without direct support for rendering feeds (Weceem does support producing feeds out of the box), using Groovy’s magic methods on java.net.URL and the XmlSlurper you can easily do this.

Here’s a complete example:

This will render five news articles from the BBC news feed. It is incredibly naïve:

1. It doesn’t make any attempt at error handling
2. It will likely blow up if there are less than 5 items in the feed
3. It doesn’t do any caching – the feed is retrieved (by the server) every time the widget is rendered

However with a few tweaks this can be turned into something more robust. I imagine we will add a specific tag for this that hides the error handling and caching issues into a future build of Weceem.

A new Grails plugin: Invitation-Only

This morning I released a new Grails plugin that lets you manage beta-invites to your app and similar.

More information here.

Co-op Bank responds to my letter of complaint

I sent a wide-ranging complaint letter to The Co-Op after hitting saturation point with the continued problems with their online business banking, a catalogue of mistakes and inefficiencies making international payments, and continuing frustrations with the idiotic personal banking chip reader and antiquated personal banking site.

You know, little things. My complaint was very much supportive of the banks ideals and its original market-leading position on online banking.

Anyway the response has finally come. To paraphrase:

• They say they have improved resourcing in the Foreign Services department (for business)
• They apologised for the mistake with my international payment and gave me £50. OK, but this doesn’t cover the time spent dealing with their antiquated systems.
• On the requirement for obsolete fax machines for international payments: “We currently action foreign transfers from written instructions to ensure there is no misinterpretation of the customer request”. This is laughably inconsistent! The whole problem with my international payment (which was faxed) was exactly this – a misinterpretation. Furthermore they go on to state that if you use their premium “Financial Director” online app, you can make international payments without a fax.
• They say the new business online banking, which is being very positively received they say (compared to existing, any site that worked every day would be well received) will be fully rolled out to all customers by August/Sept (I was griping they said Q2 2010 in response to Radio 4 Money Box).
• The security token for the new business banking is a PIN-driven code generator that “fits on a keyring” (i.e. easily stolen) and does not require a card, unlike the one used for personal banking. It will be used for logging in, and also for “some operations” like creating a new beneficiary.
• They rejected my criticism of the telephone banking as inherently insecure because “this is normal within the industry”. This was in reference to the false sense of security created by the need for pin generators etc. They seem confused here and have misunderstood the point that the full account number, sort code and full 4-digit PIN must be given over the phone to access their automated service. Add another handset to someone’s phone line, use your mobile to record the eavesdropped DTMF tones and you’re away.
• Finally, they assure me that they are investing in an “innovative new banking system” for personal banking. No specific timescales, but “the Bank is committed to this development”.

Let’s not hold our breath. New business banking has been in development for years, only just rolling out. Timescales given out for it last year, still not met revised dates.