PERLANET(1) User Contributed Perl Documentation PERLANET(1)NAMEperlanet - 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.
SEE ALSO
· perlanet
· Plagger
AUTHOR
Dave Cross, <dave@mag-sol.com>
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright (C) 2008 by Magnum Solutions Ltd.
This progam library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version
5.10.0 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have
available.
perl v5.20.2 2015-09-15 PERLANET(1)
