This evening I gave a short talk at NYC.rb on Feedtosis, my ruby library for efficiently finding new information on RSS and Atom feeds. I wrote this library for some side projects where I needed to quickly figure out which feed entries are new among lots of different feeds. It helps by hiding the details of using HTTP conditional retrieval (using Etag and last_modified tags) for RSS and Atom feeds, and also by taking care of figuring out which feed entries are new.
Although there are other libraries out there that do some of the same things, I decided to write this library after some careful thought because nothing else really had the right balance of features that I needed in terms of abstraction of the details of new feed detection and conditional GET. Feedtosis is also lightweight in that it delegates the heavy lifting of actually making HTTP requests and normalizing feeds to the very capable ruby libraries taf2-curb and FeedNormalizer respectively. In Feedtosis I tried to follow a Unix-like philosophy of building utilities that only solve one particular problem, while allowing composition with other minimal utilities in order to create robust systems. I hope that you find it useful! Feel free to forward me any comments, and please post any issues that you have with the library on its GitHub page.
In case you’d like to see the material from the presentation, check out the attached Presentation PDF or Powerpoint.
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.