vsbabu.org

Quick and dirty news aggregator

News aggregators are dime-a-dozen. I wanted to program something very simple using Python. Here’s my humble effort.

If you don’t have time to read the long text below, you can either jump to the code or see demo.

Features

• Guaranteed to setup in 15 minutes or less.
• One script. Depends on Ultra liberal parser.
• Doesn’t work with RSS 2.0 yet. Generally likes RDF a lot better than plain RSS
• Logic is similar to blagg.
• Here’s demo + my production version.

Logic

Get the RDF, parse it, save each item as a file in a folder. File names are unique, based on permalinks. If the entry date is available, then the file’s modified date is set to that. Then, in one shot, get a listing of files sorted in the reverse order of modified date and print it as an HTML page.

Bottomline

Works reasonably well enough for me. Absolutely needs to revisit this to make it usable for others. I thought I’ll put the code here, if someone wants to experiment with it. Please see the TODO list in the code.

1. Wow, neat! Are you publishing this under a particular license?

   Posted by: Mark Paschal on December 1, 2002 11:41 PM

2. Not any particular license. Use the code as you see fit, but just don't send any lawyers after me :-)

   Posted by: Babu on December 2, 2002 05:51 AM