About

In the beginning

Hushchamber was started by a simple idea in a blog post by Jason Haley. He suggested making a linkblog aggregator, and that’s what I’ve done.

Tell me more but leave out techie details

Basically, a linkblog is a blog full of links. Someone (the linkblogger) posts links relevant primarily to their area of interest (for the first linkblogs on this site it’s mostly .NET with a splash of ruby).

Hushchamber goes out to each of these linkblogs, finds new posts and sorts out what links they have. It tallies up all the links and shows them with how many people mentioned them.

Tech pr0n

Hushchamber is a combination rails application and background jobs. Here’s the breakdown:

• backgroundrb for handling background and asynchronous process. Mainly for fetching and parsing RSS feeds on a periodic basis.
• god to monitor backgroundrb and keep hushchamber filled with links. I use a version of Graham Ashton’s config to do my monitoring.
• hpricot to parse the raw feed content. Originally I went out to the permalink resource and scraped the web but that was bad for a couple reasons:
  • ASP.NET Viewstate fields that were too big for open-uri to deal with
  • I already have the content when I grab the feed, while stress the intertubes any more.
• FeedNormalizer to get to the content encoded bits of an RSS feed I couldn’t with the built in libraries.