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inewsd is (yet another) perl daemon that I’ve written. This one leeches full text news stories from Reuters.com via their RSS interface and then places them in iPod-friendly text files in a directory you choose (normally $IPODMNTPATH/Notes/News). The program can either do a one-shot mode or run in daemon mode. In both modes the program will wait until the target path exists before proceeding. In daemon mode it will wait (by default) 10 minutes in between updates, then flush the news directory and re-fetch the articles.

inewsd aquires the full article text by following the “link” element in the RSS feeds and doing some regexp magic on the article’s html. Luckily the Reuters folks like to use html comments on their pages .

This release is v0.91. I doubt I will ever number this above 0.99 as Reuters does occassionally change formatting or RSS URLs. Please see the file itself for configuration instructions.

Note: Version 0.90 is outdated due to Reuters format changes, and quite poorly written as it makes use of system() calls — not to mention that I never planned to release it. Do not bother with v0.90 unless you like to laugh at bad coding practices.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 3rd, 2005 at 6:29 pm and is filed under inewsd. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.