Fead

Fead 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

Development happens on https://chim.loan/fead. Bug reports should be filed as tickets, and feedbacks and patches are welcomed in the forum.

Copying

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.