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Ruby is becoming the language for conversion of idea-to-task, for recording and processing notes. We’re all sitting here watching 37signals and DHH pour out streams of Rails applications for organizing your thoughts.

Tobias Luetke demostrates how simple it is to parse out your Ta-da lists with Ruby’s built-in XML reader:

 xml = Document.new(body)
 self.items = []
 XPath.each(xml, "//item/") do |elem| 
   task = Task.new
   task.title = XPath.match(elem, "title/text()").to_s
   task.date  = XPath.match(elem, "pubDate/text()").to_s
   task.link  = XPath.match(elem, "link/text()").to_s
   items << task
 end

See the whole script on his site.