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App-Rssfilter-0.06-TRIAL
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/ App::Rssfilter

NAME

App::Rssfilter - remove clutter from your news feeds

VERSION

version 0.06

SYNOPSIS

$ rssfilter runfromconfig Rssfilter.yaml

OR

use App::Rssfilter;

App::Rssfilter->from_yaml( <<"End_Of_Config" )->update();
name: My Feeds
rules:
- Duplicates: DeleteItem
groups:
- name: News
  feeds:
  - Cool News: http://cool.net/latest.rss
  - Hot News: http://hot.com/top-stories.rss
  rules:
  - Category[Examples]: MarkTitle[FOR INSTANCE]
- name: Posts
  feeds:
  - Fence Blog: http://fence.com/entries.rss
  - The Mail Man: http://mail.org/posts.rss
  rules:
  - My::Custom::Matcher: My::Custom::Filter
End_Of_Config

DESCRIPTION

App::Rssfilter downloads RSS feeds and then applies rules to remove duplicate items. It comes with matchers to match items with certain categories & links, and filters to delete items, or add text to item titles.

You should use App::Rssfilter if you:

  • have a preferred RSS reader

  • subscribe to multiple RSS feeds from the same publisher

  • the same item may appear in more than one feed from that publisher

  • only wish to see it once

  • are comfortable with running rssfilter periodically

  • are comfortable serving filtered RSS feeds over HTTP

If all of the above hold, then you can simply create a cron job to run rssfilter every 15 minutes to download all your RSS feeds, and serve its output folder, and configure your RSS reader to instead use your filtered feeds instead of the occasionally-duplicated originals.

You should not use App::Rssfilter if you:

  • never want to see duplicate articles

The duplicate matcher is quite pessimistic, and strictly avoids false positives.

EXTENDING

Writing your own filters and matchers

To use your own code to match or filter RSS items, create a package like:

package My::Custom::Matcher;

sub match {
    my( $class, $item ) = @_;
    return should_match( $item );
}

Likewise for filters.

Include it in your PERL5LIB, and use your package name as the key (for matchers) or value (or filters) of a rule in your configuration:

name: things I read
feeds:
- a feed: http://a.feed.url/
rules:
- My::Custom::Matcher: My::Custom::Filter

App::Rssfilter::Rule has more examples of writing your own matching & filtering code. Note that any changes made to the item by the matcher are preserved (for the time being).

Using App::Rssfilter to fetch RSS feeds

To use App::Rssfilter in your own project, create an App::Rssfilter::Group, add feeds and rules and subgroups, then call its update method. To load and save feeds to something other than the file system, extend App::Rssfilter::Feed::Storage & provide an instance to the App::Rssfilter::Group constructor as storage.

BUGS

Only the current and last-fetched RSS documents are examined when filtering, so an item may not be classified as a duplicate and thus appear in two feeds. To illustrate, consider two RSS news feeds: National, which is frequently updated and contains items from multiple regions; and Regional, which is infrequently updated and contains items from one region. If National is filtered before Regional, an item A which occurs in both will (correctly) be filtered out of Regional, but as National is updated, eventually A will no longer be present in either the latest version of National or the last-fetched version, and so A appears in Regional.

This can be mitigated by filtering Regional before National, or by fetching the National feed less frequently.

SEE ALSO

AUTHOR

Daniel Holz <dgholz@gmail.com>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2013 by Daniel Holz.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.