wow.
much, much respect Mario...
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mario
MentiSent: 07 March 2006 14:40To:
backstage@lists.bbc.co.ukCc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Ian
ForresterSubject: [backstage] IM Persian news
bot
Following a conversation with Dan Brickley, who pointed me to Ian
Forrester's post on BBC Persian being filtered in Iran (see http://www.cubicgarden.com/blojsom/blog/cubicgarden/culture/?permalink=BBC-Persian-filtered-out-of-Iran-what-can-we-do.html),
I am now running a first version of a Persian (Farsi) news bot, along similar
lines as the newsflash bots. As Dan suggested, this could be one additional
means of bypassing the Iranian firewall... Currently the bot is only
running on MSN, and although I managed to get the right-to-left issue to work
using the official MSN client (in my case Windows Live Messenger beta), it seems
that not all 3rd party clients support the "X-MMS-IM-Format" field (where I set
the R-to-L orientation), so for example Trillian ignores it and displays the
messages incorrectly L-to-R. I haven't tried other clients yet. I don't
speak/read Farsi or Arabic, so can't really tell if the content is ok (although
I compared it visually to what's on the BBC website to get some idea). I use the
nearly-full-text feed at http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/persian/index.xml (I believe Ian set
that up?), and have noticed some strange HTML tags in the feeds, all of which
(rightly or wrongly) also make it into the bot messages.. in addition, the
menu-type texts are all in English for now, and should really be translated.
The bot is on MSN as "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". Once you join, you'll get the 10
most recent news headlines from http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/persian/index.xml every hour, to which
you can respond with a number (1 to 10) to see more details for the news
headline you're interested in (I decided to change this from the way the English
news flashes work due to the feeds containing much more text, so it wasn't
practical to send all news details in one message). No guarantees as to
bot uptime etc, but as ever, feedback
appreciated!Mario.
