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rss2leafnode-33
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/ rss2leafnode

NAME

rss2leafnode -- post RSS or Atom feeds and web pages to newsgroups

SYNOPSIS

 rss2leafnode [--options]

DESCRIPTION

RSS2Leafnode downloads RSS or Atom feeds and posts items as messages to an NNTP news server. It's designed to make simple text entries available in local newsgroups, not propagating anywhere (though that's not enforced).

Desired feeds are given in a configuration file .rss2leafnode.conf in your home directory. For example to put a feed in group "r2l.perl"

    fetch_rss ('r2l.perl', 'http://log.perl.org/atom.xml');

This is actually Perl code, so comment lines begin with # and you can write conditionals etc. The target newsgroup must exist (see "Leafnode" below). With that done, run rss2leafnode as

    rss2leafnode

You can automate with cron or similar. If you do it under user news it could be just after a normal news fetch. The --config option below lets you run different config files at different times, etc. A sample config file is included in the RSS2Leafnode sources.

Messages are added to the news spool using NNTP "POST" commands. When a feed is re-downloaded any items previously added are not repeated. Multiple feeds can be put into a single newsgroup. Feeds are inserted as they're downloaded, so the first articles appear while the rest are still in progress.

The target newsgroup can also be a news: or nntp: URL of a server on a different host or a different port number if running a personal server on a high port.

    fetch_rss('news://somehost.mydomain.org:8119/r2l.weather',
              'http://feeds.feedburner.com/PTCC');

Web Pages

Plain web pages can be downloaded too. Each time the page changes a new article is injected. This is good for a latest news or status page which don't have an RSS feed. For example

    fetch_html ('r2l.finance,
                'http://www.baresearch.com/free/index.php?category=1');

The target can be an image or similar directly too, it's simply put into a news message with its indicated MIME type. How well it displays depends on your newsreader.

The message "Subject" is the HTML <title>, or something better from URI::Title or Image::ExifTool if you've got them. URI::Title has special cases for a few unhelpful sites and Image::ExifTool can get a PNG image title.

Re-Downloading

HTTP ETag and Last-Modified headers are used, if provided by the server, to avoid re-downloading unchanged content (feeds or web pages). Values seen from the last run are saved in a .rss2leafnode.status file in your home directory.

If you've got XML::RSS::Timing then it's used for RSS ttl, updateFrequency, etc from a feed. This means the feed is not re-downloaded until its specified update times. Only a few feeds have useful timing info, most merely give a ttl advising for instance 5 minutes between rechecks.

With --verbose the next calculated update time is printed in case you're wondering why nothing is happening. The easiest way to force a re-download is to delete the ~/.rss2leafnode.status file. Old status file entries are automatically dropped if you don't fetch a particular feed for a while, so that file should normally need no maintenance.

Leafnode

rss2leafnode was originally created with the leafnode program in mind, but can be used with any server accepting posts. It's your responsibility to be careful where a target newsgroup propagates. Don't make automated postings to the world!

For leafnode see its README file section "LOCAL NEWSGROUPS" on creating local-only groups. Basically you add a line to the /etc/news/leafnode/local.groups file like

    r2l.stuff   y       My various feeds

The group name is arbitrary and the description is optional, but note it must be a tab character between the name and the "y" and between the "y" and any description. "y" means posting is allowed.

Small News

The Small News "sn" program is a possible local server too. Create groups in it with snnewgroup r2l.something. When running snntpd from inetd or similar don't forget a logger program argument on the command line as shown in its INSTALL.run, otherwise log messages from snntpd will confuse client programs, including Net::NNTP as used by rss2leafnode.

COMMAND LINE OPTIONS

The command line options are

--config=/some/filename

Read the specified configuration file instead of ~/.rss2leafnode.conf.

--help

Print some brief help information.

--verbose

Print some diagnostics about what's being done. With --verbose=2 print various technical details.

--version

Print the program version number and exit.

CONFIG OPTIONS

The following variables can be set in the configuration file

If true then download links in each item and include the content in the news message. For example,

    $rss_get_links = 1;
    fetch_rss ('r2l.finance',
      'http://au.biz.yahoo.com/financenews/htt/financenews.xml');

Not all feeds have interesting things at their link, but for those which do this can make the full article ready to read immediately, instead of having to click through from the message.

Only the immediate link target URL is retrieved. No images within the page are downloaded (which is often a good thing), and you'll probably have trouble if the link uses frames (a set of HTML pages instead of just one).

$render (default 0)

If true then render HTML to text for the news messages. Normally item text, $rss_get_links downloaded parts, and fetch_html pages are all presented as text/html. If your newsreader doesn't handle HTML very well then $render is a good way to see just the text. Setting 1 uses HTML::FormatText

    $render = 1;
    fetch_rss ('r2l.weather',
      'http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=ASXX0001&u=f');

Setting "WithLinks" uses the HTML::FormatText::WithLinks variant (you must have that module) which shows HTML links as footnotes.

    $render = 'WithLinks';
    fetch_rss ('r2l.stuff',
               'http://rss.sciam.com/sciam/basic-science');

Settings elinks, lynx or w3m dump through the respective external program (you must have HTML::FormatExternal and the program).

    $render = 'lynx';
    $rss_get_links = 1;
    fetch_rss ('r2l.sport',
               'http://fr.news.yahoo.com/rss/rugby.xml');
$render_width (default 60)

The number of columns to use when rendering HTML to plain text or when wrapping Atom text. You can set this to whatever you find easiest to read, or any special width needed by a particular feed.

Obscure Options

$rss_charset_override (default undef)

If set then force RSS content to be interpreted in this charset, irrespective of what the document says. See "ENCODINGS" in XML::Parser for the charsets supported by the parser (the .enc files under /usr/lib/perl5/XML/Parser/Encodings/ plus some builtins).

Use this option if the document is wrong or has no charset specified and isn't the XML default utf-8. Usually you'll only want this for a particular offending feed. For example,

    # AIR is latin-1, but doesn't have a <?xml> saying that
    $rss_charset_override = 'iso-8859-1';
    fetch_rss ('r2l.finance', 'http://www.aireview.com.au/rss.php');
    $rss_charset_override = undef;

By default RSS2Leafnode attempts to cope with bad multibyte sequences by re-coding to the feed's claimed charset. If that works then the text will have some substitute characters (either U+FFFD or question marks "?") and a warning is given like

    Feed http://example.org/feed.xml
      recoded utf-8 to parse, expect substitutions for bad non-ascii
      (line 214, column 75, byte 13196)

Bad single-byte codings generally aren't detected and will just go through to display something incorrect (eg. MS-DOS codepage 1252 used where Latin-1 is claimed). Nose around the raw feed as necessary to see where it goes wrong.

$html_charset_from_content (default 0)

If true then the charset used for fetch_html content is taken from the HTML itself, rather than the server's HTTP headers. Normally the server should be believed, but if a particular server is misconfigured then you can try this.

    $html_charset_from_content = 1;
    fetch_rss ('r2l.stuff',
               'http://www.somebadserver.com/newspage.html');

Variable Extent

Variables take effect from the point they're set, through to the end of the file, or until a new setting. The Perl local feature and a braces block can confine a setting to a particular few feeds. Eg.

    { local $rss_get_links = 1;
      fetch_rss ('r2l.finance',
                 'http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/dwn.en.rdf');
    }

OTHER DETAILS

Non-ascii RSS and Atom text and rendered HTML are coded as utf-8 in the generated messages so for non-ascii content you'll need a newsreader which supports that. Unrendered HTML is left in the charset the server gave, to ensure it matches any <meta http-equiv> in the document. In all cases the charset is specified in the MIME message headers or attachment parts. Transfer format in the message body is chosen by MIME::Entity (except for Atom base64 <content>) which normally means quoted-printable for non-ascii or very long lines.

Google Groups mailing list feeds such as http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php/feed/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml get a "List-Post" header pointing to the list like "foolist@googlegroups.com". This may let you post a followup to the list, depending on your newsreader. (A followup to the newsgroup goes nowhere.)

Yahoo Finance items repeated in different feeds are noticed using a special match of the links in the items so that just one copy is posted. (As of March 2010 Yahoo's items don't offer RSS guid identifiers which normally protect against duplication.)

Links are shown for RSS and Atom <link>, RSS <enclosure> and <comments>, Atom external <content> (except other XML feeds), <wfw:comment> and <wiki:diff>. Comments and "replies" links are not downloaded under $rss_get_links (currently). Comment or reply counts are shown from <thr:total>, thr:count and <slash:comments>.

<thr:in-reply-to> is used for an In-Reply-To header which might help thread display in a news reader, though of course only if the parent item was downloaded too.

Common Alerts Protocol (CAP) fields for severe weather alerts etc are shown if present (eg. from the US NOAA). This is slightly experimental.

Some pre-releases of leafnode 2 have trouble with posts to local newsgroups while a fetchnews run is in progress. The local articles don't show up until after a subsequent further fetchnews.

An attempt is made to repair bad XML from a feed using XML::Liberal if you have that module. It uses XML::LibXML so needs that module and library too. A repair can help on annoying things like bad entities and may be enough to at least see something.

Too much or too little entity escaping tends to be the most common feed problem. Too little can turn HTML into nested XML elements instead of text. RSS2Leafnode can extract that as if it was XHTML, though the result is likely to be imperfect. Too much escaping currently ends up displaying as raw or semi-raw HTML. An option for extra unescaping might be possible, to at least improve the display of a particular bad feed.

Some extended message headers are added to propagate information from the feed. These are slightly experimental but currently include

    X-RSS-Url        - originating feed URL
    X-From-Url       - the author's home page
    X-Copyright      - rights statements, perhaps several
    X-RSS-Generator  - from the feed in case it helps assign
                       blame for bad formatting

FILES

~/.rss2leafnode.conf

Configuration file.

~/.rss2leafnode.status

Status file, recording "last modified" dates for downloads. This can be deleted if something bad seems to have happened to it; the next rss2leafnode run will recreate it.

SEE ALSO

leafnode(8), HTML::FormatText, HTML::FormatText::WithLinks, HTML::FormatExternal, lynx(1), URI::Title, XML::Parser, XML::Liberal

Plagger, feed2imap(1), rss2email(1), rssdrop(1), toursst(1), http://www.gwene.org

HOME PAGE

http://user42.tuxfamily.org/rss2leafnode/index.html

LICENSE

Copyright 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 Kevin Ryde

RSS2Leafnode is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option) any later version.

RSS2Leafnode is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with RSS2Leafnode. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.