This is

as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

. Here I write about many things. In the past I wrote about other things but the past is past. I write code for people to play with, I write about my life on Twitter, and I write here.

On I wrote Looking at rawdog, on the subject of Rawdog and Howtos.

Well, I've finally got hacked off with Google Reader (not least because I am sick of Ajax loading screens), and started looking around for my own feed reader. (I did this before, but now I'm going to do it properly.) I don't like gregarius, after trying it, and I remembered that rawdog popped up in a search I did once because it has a plugin that uses templates from my old weblogging system, Vellum. So, I thought I'd give it a shot. It looks good so far; fulfils the few requirements I have for this sort of thing, which are:
  1. Heavily customisable
  2. Written in Python, so I can actually do the customisation
  3. Doesn't require a database server
I intend to try and document what I do to Rawdog to get it to be the aggregator that I really want. First job, though, is to get all my feeds imported into it. I've been chatting to Adam Sampson, the rawdog author, about it and a few things that it can do, and something that's missing is an OPML import. If you've got an OPML file, you can import it into rawdog with a (fairly complex) Python and bash one-liner as follows, where feeds.opml is the OPML you've exported from your existing aggregator: for f in $(python -c "from xml.dom import minidom; dom=minidom.parse('feeds.opml'); print ' '.join([x.getAttribute('xmlUrl') for x in dom.getElementsByTagName('outline')])"); do rawdog -v -a $f; done
Paul Freeman

Oddly enough, I've just changed from gregarius to Google Reader. Maybe it is a one in, one out sort of thing.

I've decided that no aggregator is perfect, unless it it the one I have written for me, so I should just give up on the search for the perfect aggregator. I never listen. I should have stuck with AmphetaDesk.

as days pass by » Blog Archive » Google Reader is not good

[...] I’m starting to get really hacked off with Google Reader. I’ve mentioned this already, but I thought I might fill in a few more reasons. You might be thinking: why haven’t these been submitted as bugs to the Reader team? Well, most of them aren’t really susceptible to that. I’ll come back to this point later. [...]

69/\/\

Thanks for putting up the one-liner. It made thinks a heck of a lot easier for me.

Cheers

Tero Karvinen

Thanks for your OPML to Rawdog converter. Inspired by your script, I wrote one that is a lot faster:

http://www.iki.fi/karvinen/opml-export-feeds.html

This website belongs to Stuart Langridge. Contact details are available. Don't eat yellow snow. Valid HTML5, at least in theory, except for the bits that aren't because I'm that futuristic that I'm ahead of the spec, oh yes. HTML5 help from Bruce Lawson, among others. Fonts from the superb FontSquirrel. End.