intertwingly

It’s just data

FeedTools on Ubuntu


When I first heard about FeedTools, I was skeptical.  I’ve seen many attempts at writing feed parsers by authors who have been seduced by the claims that that feeds are simple; in most cases these parsers end up being abandoned before they ever really become complete.

Loooking again, it appears to me that Bob Aman has the persistence necessary to take this task to completion, as such FeedTools merits a second look.  I’m installing from tar files as I expect to make patches.  In particular, the application I’m considering, I need to maintain the distinction between summaries and content.

To understand why, consider the feeds of Mena Trott or Tim Bray.  If I find a link to my weblog in the full content, I want tidy and trim the shorter summary as the excerpt.  Of course, in feeds where both are not provided, I’ll take what I can get.  Effectively this means that I scan the (content or summary) and then tidy and trim the (summary or content) of the ones that match.

In any case, the installation on Ubuntu turned out to be harder than I expected, but here is what I came up with:

Add Universe.

sudo apt-get install ruby rdoc
 
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/5207/rubygems-0.8.11.tgz
tar xzf rubygems-0.8.11.tgz
cd rubygems-0.8.11
sudo ruby setup.rb
cd ..
 
sudo gem install -y rake activerecord
 
sudo apt-get install libnet-ssh-ruby1.8 libtidy0
sudo gem install uuidtools tidy
 
sudo apt-get install build-essential ruby1.8-dev
sudo apt-get install sqlite libsqlite-dev
sudo gem install sqlite-ruby
2
 
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/6532/feedtools-0.2.16.tgz
tar xzf feedtools-0.2.16.tgz
cd feedtools-0.2.16
sqlite test.db < db/schema.sqlite.sql
cat <<EOF >database.yml
production:
  adapter: sqlite
  dbfile: test.db
EOF
 
rake

Oh, and one request: in the future, can all of the ._ files be stripped from the archives?