2007-12-27 RSS Everything XMAS

After the past RSS Everything blog entry made in February about RSS and the catrss from Jean-Etienne Poirrier, I come today with two new experiments for my own need (I still hope one day to generalize the script to make them more UNIX-like filtering friendly).

I wanted to merge my multiple activities (often represented in RSS) in one representation to give an overview to be accessible on my personal home page. I made a simple script rssmerge.py to do the job. A sample output result is available.

 python2.5 rssmerge.py --maxitem 200 --output phtml  
"http://www.foo.be/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?action=journal&tile=AdulauMessyDesk"
"http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=31797858@N00&lang=en-us&format=atom" 
"http://a.6f2.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=adulau/.git;a=rss" 
"http://www.librarything.com/rss/reviews/adulau"

The other script (rsscluster.py) is also a very early experiment to cluster by time multiple items from an RSS feed into another RSS feed. It's quite common to have an RSS feed containing a lot of items for small events (like bookmarks) and you want to cluster them in one item for a 2 days period.

python2.5 rsscluster.py --interval 2 --maxitem 20 "http://del.icio.us/rss/adulau">adulau-2days.xml

The two scripts are accessible in my messy git repo. No major innovation but still small step to better (or more?) use RSS (at least for me). I also hope that will trigger more discussions or other ideas around RSS (or Atom).

Tags: rss rdf unix feeds simple