Subscribing To RSS Cloud Feeds Via .TEL Domains

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not so savvy to the world of domains and DNS. I can configure standard CNAME, A, MX stuff as need be, but I don’t go much beyond that. It was intriguing then to get a request from @plaggypig asking if I could resolve feeds from .TEL lookups. One of my favorite things to do is to try stuff I don’t know anything about. 🙂

@jeremyfelt Can you resolve feed URLs from .tel names? It’s just a simple DNS lookup: dig +short davewiner.tel NAPTR|cut -d ‘ ‘ -f 4-5

From what I do know of .TEL and the surface stuff I’ve read, this didn’t seem like such a bad idea. And it took only less than an hour to implement, so here goes.

You can now subscribe to rssCloud enabled feeds in My Status Cloud by entering in a TEL Domain. Once you have submitted the domain, I grab the DNS records, get the feed data attached to it, attempt to grab the feeds, verify that they are cloud enabled, and continue accordingly.

If a feed is cloud enabled, it will be subscribed to automatically and show up on the subscriptions list. Possible error messages will return when the feed already exists, has no cloud element, or causes some other unknown error.

I was admittedly hurried in pushing up the code, so the return error handling isn’t the best. Right now the message will show above the subscribe box as “Feed 1 – result”, “Feed 2 – result”. That will get better shortly. 🙂

Part 2 of the admittedly hurried part (notice a trend?) is that I am not storing the TEL information at this time. I lookup DNS, parse the results, and play with the feeds. Soon, I will store the TEL URLs that are added and use them as part of the regular subscription process. The huge benefit in this is that you could move your feed around from client to client and not have to work too much at it.