The Planetarium Dave Cross [email_address]

Better living through feed aggregation

Web feeds make my life better

I no longer have to visit my favourite sites individually

I just visit Google Reader and all my favourite sites are there

I can consume data at least 10 times more efficiently

Which frees up a lot more of my time

To spend with family and friends

Or (more likely)

Gives me time to consume 10 times as much data

Lots of good information in web feeds

Blogs

News

Email

Twitter

Every site produces web feeds

(Well every site except Facebook)

Reading web feeds is easy

Let's do something more interesting

Let's aggregate web feeds

We'll need some software

Planet

Give it a list of web feeds

It produces a web site

And another aggregated web feed

Planet is written in Python

That's a problem for some people

Perl could do that too right?

Enter Plagger

Typically flashy Perl project web site

Plagger does everything that Planet does

But it does so much more as well

I wanted something simpler

Something closer to a Perl version of Planet

So I wrote Perlanet

Yes Terrible name I know

(Perlanet doesn't even have a web site yet)

But it does everything that Planet does

Give it a list of web feeds

It produces a web site

And another aggregated web feed

I use it to build planets

Planet Balham got me thinking

London is a big city

But many people have little connection to their neighbourhood

After reading Planet Balham for a few weeks I felt more connected

I built more local planets

Planet Tooting

Planet Clapham

Planet Streatham

Easy to set up and configure

YAML config file

Template Toolkit for output

Single program (crontab)

Many feed URLs can be calculated

http://news.google.com/ news/?q=balham &output=atom

http://news.google.com/ news/?q= balham &output=atom

Just the query string needs to change

Not a foolproof method

Chris Balham Nebraska

Can set up a planet in less than an hour

Good starting set of feeds

Google news search

Technorati blog search

Flickr tag search

Twitter

Other feeds need local knowledge

Local bloggers

Local twitterers

MPs, MEPs & Councillors

Local reviews

To do list

Perlanet uses XML::Feed

XML::Feed uses XML::RSS and XML::Atom

All four modules have bugs

Still tracking them down

Module bugs vs Broken feeds

The more feeds we test the more bugs we find

And (hopefully) fix

Please build planets

Please report issues

Please report successes

http://perlanet.mag-sol.com/