sfeed v0.7
----------

Simple RSS and Atom parser (and scripts to add reader functionality).


Dependencies
------------

- C compiler (required for sfeed.c).
- POSIX shell (optional, used by sfeed_update).
- perl  (optional, used by sfeed_plain and sfeed_html).
- curl  (optional, used by sfeed_update, http://curl.haxx.se/).
- iconv (optional, used by sfeed_update, http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/).


Files
-----

sfeed           - Binary (from sfeed.c); read XML RSS or Atom feed data from
                  stdin. Write feed data in a tab-separated format to stdout.
                  You don't need the other scripts, they're just for
                  convenience and show how you can use this program.
sfeed_update    - Shellscript; update feeds and merge with old feeds in the
                  file $HOME/.sfeed/feeds by default.
sfeed_plain     - Perl script; format feeds file (TSV) from sfeed_update
                  to plain text.
sfeed_html      - Perl script; format feeds file (TSV) from sfeed_update
                  to HTML.
sfeedrc.example - Example config file.


Files read at runtime by sfeed_update
-------------------------------------

sfeedrc        - Config file. This file is evaluated as a shellscript in
                 sfeed_update. You can for example override the fetchfeed()
                 function to use wget, fetch or an other download program or
                 you can override the merge() function to change the merge
                 logic. The function feeds() is called to fetch the feeds.


Files written at runtime by sfeed_update
----------------------------------------

feeds          - Tab-separated format containing all feeds.
                 The sfeed_update script merges new items with this file.
feeds.new      - Temporary file used by sfeed_update to merge items.


TSV format
----------

The order and format of the fields are:

item timestamp   - string (YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS [+-]HHMM)
item title       - string
item link        - string
item description - string
item id          - string
item author      - string
feed type        - string (RSS or Atom)
feed name        - string (extra field added by sfeed_update)
feed url         - string (extra field added by sfeed_update)


Usage
-----

To build and install (respects DESTDIR and PREFIX variable):

make install


To update feeds and format the feeds file (configfile argument is optional):

sfeed_update "configfile"
sfeed_plain < $HOME/.sfeed/feeds > $HOME/.sfeed/feeds.txt
sfeed_html < $HOME/.sfeed/feeds > $HOME/.sfeed/feeds.html


Example script to view feeds with dmenu, opens selected url in $BROWSER:

url=$(sfeed_plain < "$HOME/.sfeed/feeds" | dmenu -l 35 -i | sed 's@^.* \([a-zA-Z]*://\)\(.*\)$@\1\2@')
[ ! "$url" = "" ] && $BROWSER "$url"


or to view in your browser:

$BROWSER "$HOME/.sfeed/feeds.html"


or to view in your editor:

$EDITOR "$HOME/.sfeed/feeds.txt"


tip to remove feeds older than a certain date (change date="YYYYmmdd"), this
doesn't take timezones into account so it's not 100% correct:

gawk -F '\t' 'BEGIN { date=20110101 } { line=$0; gsub(/[^0-9]*/, "", $1); if (int(substr($1,0,8)) >= date) print line }' feeds > feeds.clean
mv feeds.clean feeds


License
-------

MIT, see LICENSE file.


Author
------

Hiltjo Posthuma <hiltjo@codemadness.org>