perlanetp - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

perlanet - command line interface to Perlanet.pm

SYNOPSIS

$ perlanet

Or

$ perlanet config_file

DESCRIPTION

"perlanet" is a command line program for aggregating web feeds (both Atom and RSS) and
publishing a new web page and a new web feed containing the results of that aggregation.

COMMAND LINE ARGUMENTS

"perlanet" takes one optional command line argument, which is the name of a configuration
file to use. If no filename is given then the program looks for a file called "perlanetrc"
in the current directory.

CONFIGURATION FILE

"perlanet" requires a configuration file which contains details of which feeds to
aggregate and what to do with the results of the aggregation. By default, "perlanet" looks
for a file called "perlanetrc" in the current directory, but this name can be overridden
by passing the name of a different file when calling the program.

The configuration file is in YAML format. YAML is a simple text-based file format. See
<http://yaml.org/> for further details.

Configuration Options
The configuration file can contain the following options.

title
The title of the resulting page and web feed. This option is mandatory.

description
The description of the resulting page and web feed. This option is mandatory.

url A URL which will be associated with the resulting page and web feed. This will usually
be the address where the web page will be published. This option is mandatory.

author
The name and email address of the author of the aggregated content. This item has two
sub-items - one each for the name and email address. This option is mandatory.

agent
This optional entry defines the agent string that perlanet will use when requesting
data from web sites. It's the name of the program that site owners will see in their
web site access logs. Although it is optional, it is strongly recommended that you
give a value for this configuration option and that the value you use includes contact
details so that web site owners can get in touch with you if they have any concerns
about your use of their site.

entries
The maximum number of entries to include in the aggregated content. This option is
mandatory.

entries_per_feed
The "entries" value above defines the total number of entries in the aggregated output
feed. The <entries_per_feed> value defines the number of entries to take from each of
your source feeds. For example, if this is set to 1 then there will only be one entry
from each feed in your output. If this value is 0 (or missing) then all values from
all source feeds are used.

opml
The system can optionally create an OPML file containing details of the feeds which
are being aggregated. This optional option controls whether or not this file is
created. If it exists, it should be the name of the OPML file to be created. If an
OPML file is being created, then the "feeds" options (described below) will all
require a "web" sub-option.

page
This mandatory option contains the details of the web page to be created. There are
two sub-options - "file" gives the name of the file to be created and "template" gives
the name of a Template Toolkit template which will be processed in order to create
this file. See the section "Output Template" for more details on this template, and
the web site <http://tt2.org/> for more information about the Template Toolkit.

feed
This mandatory option contains the details of the web feed to be created. There are
two sub-options - "file" gives the name of the file to be created and "format" gives
the format of the output (currently 'Atom' or 'RSS').

cache_dir
This if you give a directory name in this option then perlanet will use the cache
facility of URI::Fetch. This means that web feeds will only be downloaded when they
change.

feeds
This mandatory option gives details of the web feeds to be aggregated. Each item on
the list has one mandatory sub-option and two optional sub-options. The mandatory
sub-option is "url" which gives the URL of the feed. The optional sub-option "title"
gives a title which will be prepended to all of the entry titles taken from that feed.
If no title is given, then the title will be taken from the feed title. The optional
"web" sub-option gives a web site URL associated with the feed (often the address of
the web site that the feed comes from). This can be used to create a list of the
aggregated sites. The "web" sub-option becomes mandatory if you are creating an OPML
file.

Example Configuration File
title: planet test
description: A Test Planet
url: http://planet.example.com/
author:
name: Dave Cross
email: dave@dave.org.uk
entries: 20
opml: opml.xml
page:
file: index.html
template: index.tt
feed:
file: atom.xml
format: Atom
cache_dir: /tmp/feeds
feeds:
- url: http://blog.dave.org.uk/atom.xml
title: Dave's Blog
web: http://blog.dave.org.uk/
- url: http://use.perl.org/~davorg/journal/rss
title: Dave's use.perl Journal
web: http://use.perl.org/~davorg/journal/
- url: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/feed/31?au=2607
title: Dave on O'Reillynet
web: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2607

Output Template
The web page is created from a Template Toolkit template. This template is passed two
variables.

feed
This is the XML::Feed object which has been used to create the aggregated feed. See
the XML::Feed documentation for details of the data that is held in this object.

cfg This is the contents of the configuration file, converted to a (nested) Perl hash.

Example Output Template
This is a simple template which uses the "feed" variable to display details of the
aggregated feeds.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>[% feed.title %]</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>[% feed.title | html %]</h1>
<p>[% feed.description | html %]</p>
[% FOREACH entry IN feed.entries %]
<h2><a href="/[% entry.link | url | html %]">[% entry.title | html %]</h2></a>
[% entry.content.body %]
[% IF entry.author OR entry.issued %]
<p>Published[% IF entry.author %] by [% entry.author | html; END %]
[% IF entry.issued %] on [% entry.issued | html; END %]</p>
[% END %]
[% END %]
<hr />
<address>[% feed.author | html %] / [% feed.modified | html %]</address>
</body>
</html>

In the future, the Perlanet wiki at <http://wiki.github.com/davorg/perlanet> will contain
a cookbook of useful ideas to include in the output template.

SUPPORT

There is a mailing list which acts as both a place for developers to talk about
maintaining and improving Perlanet and also for users to get support. You can sign up to
this list at <http://lists.mag-sol.com/mailman/listinfo/perlanet>

To report bugs in Perlanet, please use the CPAN request tracker. You can either use the
web page at <http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Report.html?Queue=Perlanet> or send an email to
bug-Perlanet@rt.cpan.org.

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