pushl 0.0.1

A conduit for pushing changes in a feed to the rest of the IndieWeb

Pushl

A simple tool that parses content feeds and sends out appropriate push notifications (WebSub, Webmention, etc.) when they change.

See http://publ.beesbuzz.biz/blog/113-Some-thoughts-on-WebMention for the motivation.

Basic usage

pip install pushl
pushl -c cache_dir http://example.com/feed.xml

Back-of-the-envelope design

Tool should be pip-installable

Should be configurable with a list of feeds (from command line or from a config.yaml or whatever) and associated push mechanisms to provide

Mechanisms should include:

• WebSub (with configured endpoint)
• WebNotify (just calls into ronkyuu or webmention-tools or something)
  • Should notify all extant URLs as well as any which were in the previous version but are now gone
  • but be sensitive to ones with a rel that isn't in a whitelist (e.g. don't want author, self, nofollow, nonotify, navigation, etc)
  • maybe it would be easier to just farm this out to telegraph...
• Configurable Publ/Jekyll/Octopress/etc. syndication? (i.e. write out syndicated content to $HOME/mysite.example.com/content/syndicated/foo.md, possibly mirroring images locally)
  • Needs to have some sort of configurable template for the headers, with defaults for the more common systems (Publ, Pelican, Jekyll?)
  • Could probably use Jinja2 for this

Should be smart about caching; for example:

• Store the feed locally, and use if-modified-since and file fingerprinting to determine if items need to be retrieved
• Store the retrieved items locally, and use if-modified-since and file fingerprinting to determine if items need to be updated
  • Should always retrieve items which are either new to the feed, or which disappeared since the last retrieval
• This storage directory should be configurable, and have a reasonable default (like $HOME/.local/share/Pushl)

Other worthwhile ideas:

• Support RFC 5005
• Detect deletions, maybe? This is a SHOULD in Webmention, and a good idea for the syndication
  • This is a lot easier in RFC 5005 feeds
  • Or possibly, compare set of current items with the items listed in the previous feed retrieval, and send out one last ping/update for the items which disappeared from the feed (since Webmention doesn't differentiate between those two cases)
• Have post-run hooks (for example, syncing syndicated content stores via git-based deployment or whatever)