Due to the complete lack of documentation on the internal server and the inability for the search to turn up anything useful I’ve spent the last half an hour digging through the source code trying to work out how the hell to access the RSS feed. So far the best I’ve got is http://localhost:9099/syndicate/auctions.xml which simply returns this despite there being several active auctions.
<?xml version=“1.0” ?>
<rss version="0.91">
<channel>
<title>JBidwatcher Auctions</title>
<link>/syndicate/auctions.xml</link>
<description>null</description> <language>en-us</language> </channel>

Can someone please tell me what the proper url structure for accessing the internal RSS is before I go mad?

Greetings,
There should be a little RSS feed symbol in the lower left of your JBidwatcher screen. All you have to do is click that, and it’ll let you copy the three URLs that it recognizes to your clipboard…I’m sorry that’s not clearer. You’ve got the URL format right, basically, but it sounds like you went through a lot of work to get it. I’m glad someone looks at the code, but I wish it had been easier for you.

The three are: Recently ended, items you’re bidding/sniping on, and items closest to ending.

Syndicate doesn’t take auctions.xml as a syndicated list; it takes ended.xml, ending.xml, and bid.xml.

Do you have other ideas for syndicate-able data that changes over time and is bounded in length?

What do you think of this diagram: http://www.jbidwatcher.com/download/JBidwatcher…

I’ve just started poking at building better documentation; I think it’s a little overwhelming, but I’m not sure how to make it better. I was going to do a display like that for each major dialog in the system, including the RSS feed list dialog…

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Ah, I forgot that there’s an internal RSS feed. As jbidwatcher runs on my “homeserver”, I use a greasemonkey script to add ebay items and used the internal webserver to access the auctions later. I got really frustrated, as the internal webserver doesn’t seem to sort by any column (by ending would be nice). And when you finally found your auction, it links to a proxied version of the page, where neither umlauts, images or javascript work.

So now I’m glad I found the RSS feed. I’m still wondering why the “ending” feed sorts backwards. In all my other feeds (and eBay), the most recent item is at top. It would be useful to see the time left in the title, as I use my RSS feed with titles only.

Oh, and diagrams are nice. But I think it’s important to make the documentation easily index-able for search-engines.

Cheers for that but I eventually found that http://localhost:9099/synchronize contains all the auctions which is more what I was after. Due to the fact that I haven’t touched Java in about 6 years I’ve written this little PHP script that pretty much replicates the current web interface and adds sorting ability. There’s some things missing at the minute, most notably sniping but I’ll add it in when I’ve got time.
If you’re going to use it make sure to put in the server IP if you’re running the PHP on another machine and change your username/password.
If I can be bothered to find a decent IDE for Java I’ll grab the source for JBidwatcher at some point and try to port over some of the improvements such as sorting and being able to add your own password which I intend to add. That and making it not look like ass. Some AJAXy goodness would be nice too.

Greetings,
Yeah, I punted on the internal web interface when I realized that most users can’t access their home systems from elsewhere, and then I focused on the My JBidwatcher project, which allows folks to upload listing information to my central server, so folks can view their listings there.

I’ve started using it a bit more, using the web service to sync to an iPhone app.

It still looks like…tush, let’s say. :) I hate developing in XSL.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!