====== fetchFeed ======

<note warning>I no longer maintain or even use this thing myself, as I've turned into a happy Bloglines user. However, I'll keep the site up anyway, just don't expect any changes, bugfixes or stuff like that ;)</note>

===== What is it? =====

fetchFeed is a RSS aggregator similar in function to the common unix mail utilities fetchmail and getmail. It's purpose is to aggregate a list of given RSS/RDF feeds (stored in opml) and saving the fetched items as mails into a given maildir, using subfolders in the maildir to sort the feeditems according to feed and opml-structure.
The generated mails are of the multipart/alternative MIME Type and consist of a plaintext and a html part of the feed item. The structure of both parts is controlled by templates lying either in the main programm folder or in ''~/.fetchfeed'' - where exactly is determined by the configfile - and having the ending .tmpl
The feeds to aggregate are given in an opml file whose location also is given in the config. fetchFeed also implements a logging feature, using ''Log::Dispatch'', which can be used to log to files, the screen or the syslog. 

===== Why? =====

The reason I wrote fetchFeed is a rather simple one: I was tired of standalone RSS Readers, and  Thunderbird - though quiete handy when it comes to working with mails - was not rather practical due to it's lack of a fully working OPML import/export feature. Since I recently switched from fetching my mails "personally" to a solution based on the local server, a Maildir, Courier IMAP and getmail I thought it would turn out rather handy to have my feeds handled in a central way as well, making it possible to read mails and RSS wherever I am as long as I'm able to get my hands on an imap-enabled mail client.
So I finally grabbed the housecopy of the camel book and used the breaks in job and studies of two weeks to implement what I missed.

===== Requirements =====

In order to use fetchFeed, Perl and the following modules need to be installed:
  * [[cpan>XML::RSS::TimingBot]]
  * [[cpan>XML::RAI]]
  * [[cpan>Mail::Box]]
  * [[cpan>HTML::FormatText::WithLinks]]
  * [[cpan>HTML::Entities]]
  * [[cpan>Tie::File::AsHash]]
  * [[cpan>MIME::Entity]]
  * [[cpan>HTML::Template]]
  * [[cpan>Text::Template]]
  * [[cpan>Log::Dispatch]]
  * [[cpan>XML::Simple]]

<note classic>I doubt that this thing works on a win32 platform. I wrote it only to be used with the linux server running here and therefore tested it just in this environment. You might have luck with [[http://www.cygwin.com|cygwin]], [[http://www.activestate.com/|ActivePerl]] seems not to hold all necessary packages in their ppm repository.</note>

===== Download =====

==== fetchFeed Version 1.0.3 ====

Released: 2005/03/10 \\
md5sum: 9e7ed93141f75e8eae7101ac573742fa

Download: {{snippets:fetchfeed-1.0.3.tar.gz|fetchfeed-1.0.3.tar.gz}}

==== fetchFeed Version 1.0.2 ====

Released: 2005/02/27 \\
md5sum: 89f6c1e2fca5eb223f8e368d99f42756

Download: {{snippets:fetchfeed-1.0.2.tar.gz|fetchfeed-1.0.2.tar.gz}}

==== fetchRSS Version 1.0.1 ====

Released: 2005/02/13 \\
md5sum: 82d5a31f9b3283f4b140a8f45b4f5aae

Download: {{snippets:fetchrss-1.0.1.tar.gz|fetchrss-1.0.1.tar.gz}}

==== fetchRSS Version 1.0 ====

Released: 2005/01/17 \\
md5sum: 872d5bf1cf0029ea34659e4c28247c26

Download: {{snippets:fetchrss-1.0.tar.gz|fetchrss-1.0.tar.gz}}

===== Changes =====

==== 1.0.2 => 1.0.3 ====

  * Commandline option: ''--config FILE'' for telling fetchFeed to use a specific config file
  * Commandline option: ''--opml FILE'' for telling fetchFeed to use a specific opml file
  * Commandline option: ''--help'' shows a small help text
  * Commandline option: ''--version'' shows the version of the script
  * Bugfix: Feedparser is now encapsulated into eval to stop script from dying a horrible death when an invalid feed is encountered
  * Bugfix: Folders for the feeds are now created correctly
  * Bugifx: Now checks whether title or url of a given feed are empty and skips feed instead of dying if so

==== 1.0.1 => 1.0.2 ====

  * Name change from fetchRSS to fetchFeed
  * Additional Header ''X-ItemUrl'' added to mailheader
  * New attribute ''mode'' in opml allows now to specify whether to display the content of the feed or an iframe
  * New config option ''idfile'' to specify of which item parts the seed for the md5-sum consists of
  * Bugfix: Recipient given in configfile is now inserted into mail correctly

==== 1.0.0 => 1.0.1 ====

  * Bugfix: For calculating the md5-sum to recognize an already fetched feed item, the items subject is now ISO-8859-1 encoded first.

~~DISCUSSION:off~~