fetchFeed

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.

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.

In order to use fetchFeed, Perl and the following modules need to be installed:

• XML::RSS::TimingBot
• XML::RAI
• Mail::Box
• HTML::FormatText::WithLinks
• HTML::Entities
• Tie::File::AsHash
• MIME::Entity
• HTML::Template
• Text::Template
• Log::Dispatch
• XML::Simple

Released: 2005/03/10
md5sum: 9e7ed93141f75e8eae7101ac573742fa

Download: fetchfeed-1.0.3.tar.gz

Released: 2005/02/27
md5sum: 89f6c1e2fca5eb223f8e368d99f42756

Download: fetchfeed-1.0.2.tar.gz

Released: 2005/02/13
md5sum: 82d5a31f9b3283f4b140a8f45b4f5aae

Download: fetchrss-1.0.1.tar.gz

Released: 2005/01/17
md5sum: 872d5bf1cf0029ea34659e4c28247c26

Download: fetchrss-1.0.tar.gz

• 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

• 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

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