This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz
by Patrick Lioi.
Original Post: Plagg: The Good-Enough Aggregator
Feed Title: Patrick Lioi on Python
Feed URL: http://patrick.lioi.net/syndicate/Python/RSS2.xml
Feed Description: Entries from the Python category of my personal site.
I've written an aggregator in hour-long spurts over the summer, and even though it's not really complete enough for most people to be satisfied with, I'm making it public anyway. Plagg is a cgi that will only display aggregated items that you haven't seen before. There is no "history" because I'd never use one. You click on the "rebuild" link to request a fetch, and all new items since the last fetch will be displayed.
plagg.zip contains a plagg/ directory, which contains plagg.css, plagg.html, plagg.py, WebEnvironment.py, and subscriptions.txt. You'll also need Mark Pilgrim's feedparser and Timothy O'Malley's timeoutsocket.py.
Be sure to change the first line of plagg.py to your own Python interpreter's location. Place the plagg/ directory somewhere in your server document root.
Create a bookmark to plagg/plagg.html. View the page, and click on
the "rebuild" link to check for new items.
The config file is currently very picky. subscriptions.txt is composed
of a series of subscriptions. A subscription looks like this:
Here, "title", "rss", and "link" have obvious meaning. "recent" is the link to the most recently aggregated item,
and is used to determine which items are new during a fetch.
"wait" is the minimum number of seconds that must pass between successive fetches to this feed, which keeps you from pounding
a feed, and keeps plagg from taking too long to run during
a fetch. "pinged" is the time of the last fetch.
When adding a new feed to subscriptions.txt, recent and pinged
must be given dummy values, like so:
title: Patrick Lioi
rss: http://patrick.lioi.net/syndicate/RSS2.xml
link: http://patrick.lioi.net/
recent: This line to be set by plagg on the next run!
wait: 86400
pinged: 1
Subscriptions must be separated from each other by exactly one
blank line. If plagg reports any errors, it is probably because
your subscriptions.txt contains extra endlines somewhere.
One unfortunate side effect of the pinged/wait fields is that, over time,
all subscriptions with the same wait period will get grouped together, so you might hit rebuild all day with no new items displayed, and then when you rebuild at 7:34 it'll take 30 seconds and present you with 40 new items. I occasionally go through the subscriptions file and set a few of their pinged values back to 1, to keep them from piling up too much. This will change when I decide to implement a better timing mechanism.
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