The occasional scrivener

Integrating feeds into Blosxom

My recent work fixing posting via email to this blog, coupled with my previous efforts getting my del.icio.us links posted, has got me thinking that there has to be a better way of handling this.

My post-by-email is basically “grab the content of the body and put it in a file”. The del.icio.us integration is a custom script that reads the RSS feed for my links daily, munges it into Markdown syntax, and then writes to a file. This works fine for now, but what if I want to use Blogline’s clippings, or Newsvine’s blog? I don’t want umpteen blogs floating around: I want one, which I can update in multiple ways.

So what’s needed is a RSS/Atom reader that subscribes to the feeds of the content I’m creating, fetches the relevant data, formats them in a source-dependent fashion, and then posts the data.

Requirements:

• Perl preferred for hacking reasons, but other langs acceptable. Must run on my hosting environment (basically a Linux server).
• per-feed formatting customization (sounds like a job for XSLT)
• per-feed posting customization (I want to aggregate all links into one post, while other stuff might as well go up immediately)

Writing my own stuff for this feels like inventing lots of wheels at the same time. Any tips?

Update: Looks like Blagg may fit the bill. It’s very blosxom-like in style.

Update 2006-02-01: The Perl module XML::RSS::Parser looks like it can do a lot off stuff. I’ll have a gander at the docs during the next few days.

Updated on Wednesday, 2006-02-01. Posted at 23:42, in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
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