On Wed, 5 Mar 2003 02:39:53 +0900, Chris Morris wrote:
> I checked RAA and didn't see anything out there. Anyone working on
> an rss/etc aggregator/reader in Ruby?

Yes, and no. I've written a validating RSS 0.91, 0.92, and 2.0
library which is API-compatible with Chad Fowler's RSS library
version 0.91. I haven't yet uploaded it to the sourceforge project I
created for this, but Chad has expressed an interest in helping out
and completing it for RSS 1.0 (based on RDF) and other features.
Chad's library includes a caching system, which I've incorporated
and enhanced as RSS::Cache (it doesn't yet obey <skipHours> and
<skipDays>, but it will), and I have also taken his rssdrb example
and made an RSS::Cache client/server setup with DRb.

So, the RSS infrastructure is perhaps 75% complete (I'll figure out
how complete later today), but the next step would be to write an
aggregator. The biggest problem I see with this is that FXRuby
doesn't have an HTML renderer component, and I don't think that any
of the other libraries are suitably cross-platform (e.g., Gnome2) or
are similarly hobbled by a lack of an HTML renderer.

I was wondering what it might take to make kHTML work with FOX (and
thus FXRuby), but that's not really my area of expertise, either. I
just thought it might be possible -- after all, Apple thought it was
good enough for Safari; why not use it for FOX programs?

> I've checked a couple of freeware ones, but they see a little
> clunky still -- it'd be nice if it could only show me the latest
> items per site, rather than showing the whole feed when only the
> latest one is new.

The one that I use -- well, sort of (I don't use it often enough) --
is Syndirella. It's got good buzz and is free, but requires .NET to
work.

The Sourceforge project I created[1] is for all things Ruby and RSS,
so if you or someone else wants to look at building a full news
aggregator on top of this library, let me know and I'll add you to
the project. (My add-on for tDiary to do RSS with tDiary will also
show up here.)

-austin
[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/ruby-rss/

-- Austin Ziegler, austin / halostatue.ca on 2003/03/04 at 12:58:51 PM