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I like the functionality of Yahoo Pipes, but don't want to leave the task of processing RSS feeds to a privately owned web service which might disappear tomorrow and I don't exactly trust my data with. I'd like to do this with software I can run locally (on a server or desktop; doesn't matter).

There must be something out there that handles some of the basic functionality of Pipes such as merging feeds, filtering, querying for keywords, etc. but I'm having a hard time finding it. There are various parsers that might do the job, but they're overly flexible and require much configuration upfront. Ideally I'd have something in the lines of a simple command that I can run in a cron job, or a daemon, which will fetch some feeds, perform the operations I want, and output or serve the resulting RSS feed. Any pointers appreciated.

Michael Terry
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mgunes
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  • I think you will find that feed manipulation sofware is, almost by definition, far from simple ;) – 8128 Oct 19 '10 at 20:47
  • I have the same feeling. Maybe if Murat go back and edit their Ask, we can redo our Answer to best fit. – crncosta Nov 13 '10 at 19:17

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I don't know if this is particularly helpful, but I've written a little script to scrape together a bunch of feeds into an html document. This has been running on my computers every hour for years now. I've written it when I just started using Python. But it works.

Even though it's quite late in the day, I've somehow managed to put together a README document, it should be very straightforward to use now.

Download (15,4 KB)

It works nicely on Ubuntu 10.10, but it may require that you install python-feedparser (which is actually doing all the work).

I hope it's of some use.

Stefano Palazzo
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  • Thanks; it's not useful for this purpose but I may need it in the future. Let me know if you've made other things using feedparser; I may end up writing my own thing with it. – mgunes Oct 20 '10 at 07:28
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There is a similar question at Superuser. My recoomendation is newsbeuter feed reader: Simple and fast. Easy to install:

  $ sudo aptitude install newsbeuter
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crncosta
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  • I'm not looking for a feed reader; I'm looking for a simple way to do things like sort, merge and filter feeds. – mgunes Nov 12 '10 at 21:35
  • In this case, you are looking for Universal Feed Parser (http://www.feedparser.org). Its a python lib (all in one file) very easy to use. Very good choice for a prototype project and also recommended for production too. – crncosta Nov 12 '10 at 21:41
  • I know about it, as you'll note in my comment to Stefano's answer. – mgunes Nov 12 '10 at 23:04
  • @Murat: Your 'Ask' is really difficult to answer. Looks like you are not looking for a library where you can starting some code with, and also you are no looking for a feed reader in the sense of a desktop application. You should give us more clues to help answer you instead of downgrade us. – crncosta Nov 12 '10 at 23:19
  • I think the question is quite clear. If there's something particular you find vague, please ask for it to be clarified in a comment to the original question. – mgunes Nov 13 '10 at 02:06
  • newsbeuter... love it... nice and simple and does what I want. Thanks (+) for the recomendation – Peter.O Feb 15 '11 at 04:07
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For my currently rather limited real use scenarios, I ended up using Planet Venus. There seems to be no general purpose tool in the lines of what I described, so I'll probably make my own.

mgunes
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Have you looked into Liferea. Seems the most commonly used rss feeder application in Ubuntu and it GTK.

sudo apt-get install liferea
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    I don't think Murat is looking for a reader – lovinglinux Oct 19 '10 at 02:26
  • Good answer, wrong question... I found this question because I was looking for an RSS reader .. I'm using the Terminal more these days, so I'll go for crncosta's suggestion, but I am tempted by liferea.. It is nice and simple, and that's what I want.. (+) – Peter.O Feb 15 '11 at 04:26