TouRSSt -- RSS channel news items where you want them.

  Tourist \Tour"ist\, n.
     One who makes a tour, or performs a journey in a circuit.

TouRSSt tours the web so you don't have to. Run frequently, it pulls
new RSS news items from a number of channels and puts them where you
want.

Currently it can deliver news items to a Maildir, but future additions
will include sending over SMTP, perhaps writing out aggregated RSS
feeds, and so on. TouRSSt is built to be reasonably modular, so you
should have no problems adding your own delivery plugin, if you just
know a bit of Python.


Motivation:

1. News should come to you.

2. You should have control, not some company 
   on the other side of the net.

3. News are news only once.

4. Reading a two-week backlog of Slashdot with
   a browser sucks.


Status:

TouRSSt is now at a stage where I am ready to stop reading Slashdot
through a browser.


Getting Started:

1. Galeon users:

   - Make a folder in your bookmarks called "RSS". Put bookmarks
     pointing to RSS resources in it.

   - Make a maildir ~/Maildir (maildirmake may be useful)

   - Run toursst

   - Read mail in ~/Maildir/.TouRSSt.*

2. Users of other XBEL-compliant web browsers:

   - Follow the instructions for Galeon users, but specify location of
     your bookmarks with --bookmark-file=PATH.

3. Users of other popular browsers:

   - Follow the instructions for Galeon users, except after editing
     your bookmarks, export then as XBEL or convert with an external
     utility. Give path to this file to toursst with
     --bookmark-file=PATH.

If you don't want to mess with your bookmarks, you can just write XBEL
by hand. This should get you started:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xbel version="1.0">
  <title>My XBEL kludge</title>
  <folder>
    <title>RSS</title>
    <bookmark href="http://www.example.com/news.rss">
      <title>Example News</title>
    </bookmark>
    <bookmark href="http://boingboing.net/rss.xml">
      <title>Boing Boing</title>
    </bookmark>
  </folder>
</xbel>



License:

GNU General Public License.


Tommi Virtanen <tv@debian.org>