fead

This is a tool for advertising other blogs you like on your own by embedding the summary of their latest post(s) extracted from their web feed. It is a rewrite of openring with (rejected) concurrency support in Python without any third-party library.

Installation

On POSIX systems, run the usual make install with configurable PREFIX. The following programs are needed for building and installation:

make
help2man
install

Python 3.11+ is also required, both for generating the manual and at runtime.

On other systems, a package installer specific for Python might be preferred.

Usage

$ fead --help
Usage: fead [OPTION]...

Generate adverts from web feeds.

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --version         show program's version number and exit
  -F PATH, --feeds PATH
                        file containing newline-separated web feed URLs
  -f URL, --feed URL    addtional web feed URL (multiple use)
  -s, --strict          abort when fail to fetch or parse a web feed
  -n N, --count N       maximum number of ads in total (default to 3)
  -p N, --per-feed N    maximum number of ads per feed (default to 1)
  -l N, --length N      maximum summary length (default to 256)
  -t PATH, --template PATH
                        template file (default to stdin)
  -o PATH, --output PATH
                        output file (default to stdout)

Any use of -f before -F is ignored.

Template

The template is used by Python str.format to generate each advert. It can contain the following fields, delimited by braces ({ and }).

source_title: title of the web feed
source_link: URL to the feed's website
title: title of the feed item
link: URL to the item
time: publication time
summary: truncated content or description

The publication time is a Python datetime.datetime object, which supports at least C89 format codes, e.g. {time:%Y-%m-%d}.

Examples

Given the these URLs in a feeds file:

https://adol.pw/index.xml
https://cnx.gdn/feed.xml
https://xrvs.net/index.xml

Advertisement of the two latest blogs among them, along with articles by Drew DeVault, can be generated via the following command.

echo "<article>
  <h3><a href='{link}'>{title}</a></h3>
  {summary}&mdash;<a href='{source_link}'>{source_title}</a>, {time:%F}
</article>" | fead -F feeds -f https://drewdevault.com/blog/index.xml -n 2

Contributing

Patches should be sent to ~cnx/misc@lists.sr.ht using git send-email with the following configurations:

git config sendemail.to '~cnx/misc@lists.sr.ht'
git config format.subjectPrefix 'PATCH fead'

Bug reports and feedbacks should be sent to the same list, with the program's name mention in the subject.

Copying

AGPLv3

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.