irssi-rss, RSS feeder for irssi

Hello,

Recently I made an RSS newsitem announcer for irssi, because I wanted to
keep up with the news items that interrested me, but I lacked the skills
to code such a thing as an 'X11 RSS Ticker Tape application', which was
my first idea to code...

After some developing, I gathered that now would be a good time to
release this to the public, and see what the reactions are to my little
project. I'm quite happy with it, as I can reach it from wherever I can
get to my screen which runs irssi for me, and it has proven to be
accurate too ;)

Since it needs an external tool to process the feeds from the various
websites, I couldn't just submit this to scripts.irssi.org, that is why
i'm telling here ;) Getting the feeds from within irssi-rss.pl would
likely block irssi when a website is not responding...

I made this "first-release" readme file, which i will include here.

Anyone interrested can get the sources from
   http://www.freshdot.net/stuff/irssi-rss.tar.gz
I made a little website which isn't finished yet, on 
   http://www.freshdot.net/irssi.shtml

I hope to get some reactions on this :)
Either good or bad, let me know...

There are absolutely NO warranties to using these sources. Please read
the source before you load it in irssi. I may not be held liable for
damage done, even though I think it's a perfectly safe tool...

The README.txt is as follows: (included in the tarball)

irssi-rss
---------

This is a little script + daemon to provide RSS streams in irssi. Usage
is quite simple, as I will explain below...

This tarball extracts the following files:

bin/rssfeeder
-------------
	This is the daemon that requests the RSS/XML feeds with some
interval. It will store the data in ~/.irssi/irssi-rss/rssfeeder_<hash>
or irssi-rss.pl to read, parse and display. This little daemon runs in
the background, and by default checks the feeds every five minutes.
Since rssfeeder keeps track of itself, you can put this in cron like so:

@hourly /home/yourlogin/bin/rssfeeder --cron

and it will automatically restart, if it might die for some reason.


.irssi/irssi-rss/rssfeeder.lst
------------------------------
	This file contains all the feeds you want to display in irssi. As an
example, slashdot is included. The syntax is fairly simple, a unique
tag, and a direct URL to the RSS feed on a single line is enough. So if
you were to add the Debian Security Advisory RSS feed you'd add the line:

DSA http://www.debian.org/security/dsa.rdf

to this file, and rssfeeder will automatically pick it up after a while,
and irssi-rss will start announcing it.


.irssi/script/irssi-rss.pl
--------------------------
	This is the perl script that you will load in irssi to parse the
feeds and maintain a record on what has been announced and what is new
news. By default it checks for new items every 10 seconds.


.irssi/script/autorun/irssi-rss.pl
----------------------------------
	This is a symlink, so irssi-rss gets loaded automatically at
startup. You may remove this if you don't want irssi-rss to be loaded at
irssi startup automatically.


Controls within irssi
---------------------

The script binds a new command '/rss' in irssi. You can use this to
review the feeds, or publically announce items you find interessting
enough to share with your IRC friends. By default, irssi-rss.pl will
*NOT* announce the news items publically.

A short description of the available options inside irssi:

/rss list
	Will show all news items
/rss list <feedtag>
	Will show all news items for this specific feed-tag.
/rss reset
	Will reset the "statehash". This causes all old items to be
	announced again, but it will also free the memory claimed by the
	statehash which, in this version, keeps growing and growing ;)
/rss say <tag-item#>
	Will publically announce the specific news item to the current
	window. Please ensure yourself that you are announcing the correct
	item, since positions will change. Newest items are always at the
	beginning.
/rss help
	Although advertised, will not do anything yet ;)


DEPENDENCIES
------------

rssfeeder, the deamon that retrieves the RSS feeds, depends on:
	Unix::Syslog, provided by Debian package libunix-syslog-perl
	LWP::Simple, provided by Debian package libwww-perl
	Digest::MD5, provided by Debian package perl

irssi-rss.pl, the irssi loadable script, depends on:
	Digest::MD5, provided by Debian package perl
	URI::Escape, provided by Debian package liburi-perl
	And the modules provided by irssi itself.


ANNOUNCES
---------

By default, news announcements will go to the currently active window.
If you do not like this, you can name a window 'irssi-rss' and this will
cause all announcements to go to that window instead of the current
active window. To select a window for this purpose, go to that specific
window, and type:

/window name irssi-rss

The next announcements will go to that window, instead of the current
active window.


QUESTIONS, COMMENTS
-------------------

Please direct all questions, comments, improvements and other such
mail to me at the address [email protected].

-- 
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