As expected from the latest trend in the Perl blogosphere this post will be about Roles. And Moose! And Roles in Moose! And Moose in Roles! And Roles outside Mooseââ¬Â¦
Seriously now, this is a post about a completely non-Moosey and non-Roley script I wrote to filter the use.perl.org master journals' feed. What this script does is fetch the Atom feed of all the use.perl.org journals' posts, and filters out the entries of the use.perl.org authors that the invoker specified.
Here is out to use it. First of all: svn checkout it (or otherwise fetch it using HTTP). Then you can simply use:
perl filter-use-perl-journals.pl -o everything.atom
Then you can serve everything.atom with a web-server to read it using your web feeds' aggregator.
To simply create a non-filtered copy of the feed. Now let's say you want to get rid of posts from my journal (because it sucks). In that case, say:
perl filter-use-perl-journals.pl -o non-shlomif.atom \
--blacklist="Shlomi Fish"
Now, let's say you also want to get rid of Ovid's posts. I have no idea why you'd want to do that, because his journal is great, but it's just for the sake of the example. In that case, do:
perl filter-use-perl-journals.pl -o non-shlomif-and-ovid.atom \
--blacklist="Shlomi Fish" --blacklist="Ovid"
Finally, there's the --rand flag which is useful in case you're running the script with cron. What it does is wait for a period of time of random length, before fetching the feed, so the HTTP server would not be overloaded at regular periods. This requires a working /dev/urandom for the time being.
The script is made available under the MIT/X11 Licence so its use is completely unencumbered. I wrote this script today, because I have a personal use for it, but other people may find it useful too. It requires a recent version of Perl (5.8.x should be enough I think) and XML-Feed.