Looking at rawdog
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:
- Heavily customisable
- Written in Python, so I can actually do the customisation
- 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
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.
15 hours later
[...] 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. [...]
33 hours later
Thanks for putting up the one-liner. It made thinks a heck of a lot easier for me.
Cheers
4 days later
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
47 weeks later