Configuration Options

The configuration file can contain the following options.

title

The title of the resulting page and web feed. This option is mandatory.

description

The description of the resulting page and web feed. This option is mandatory.

url

A URL which will be associated with the resulting page and web feed. This will usually be the address where the web page will be published. This option is mandatory.

author

The name and email address of the author of the aggregated content. This item has two sub-items - one each for the name and email address. This option is mandatory.

agent

This optional entry defines the agent string that perlanet will use when requesting data from web sites. It's the name of the program that site owners will see in their web site access logs. Although it is optional, it is strongly recommended that you give a value for this configuration option and that the value you use includes contact details so that web site owners can get in touch with you if they have any concerns about your use of their site.

entries

The maximum number of entries to include in the aggregated content. This option is mandatory.

entries_per_feed

The "entries" value above defines the total number of entries in the aggregated output feed. The <entries_per_feed> value defines the number of entries to take from each of your source feeds. For example, if this is set to 1 then there will only be one entry from each feed in your output. If this value is 0 (or missing) then all values from all source feeds are used.

entry_sort_order

Entries have two dates, issued (which is the date that the item was first published) and modified (which is the date that the item was last updated). This configuration option controls which of these two dates are used to sort the entries in a feed. It can be one of the two values "issued" or "modified". If this option is omitted, then "modified" is used.

cutoff_duration

Sometimes you might want your generated feed to only contain entries from, say, the last month. You can do that with the "cutoff_duration" configuration option. This takes the form of sub-parameters which are in the same format as you would use when calling the constructor for DateTime::Duration (which isn't surprising as that's what happens to them). For example the to exclude entries that are more than a month old, you would use:

    cutoff_duration:
      months: 1
    

opml

The system can optionally create an OPML file containing details of the feeds which are being aggregated. This optional option controls whether or not this file is created. If it exists, it should be the name of the OPML file to be created. If an OPML file is being created, then the "feeds" options (described below) will all require a "web" sub-option.

page

This mandatory option contains the details of the web page to be created. There are two sub-options - "file" gives the name of the file to be created and "template" gives the name of a Template Toolkit template which will be processed in order to create this file. See the section "Output Template" for more details on this template, and the web site <http://tt2.org/> for more information about the Template Toolkit.

feed

This mandatory option contains the details of the web feed to be created. There are two sub-options - "file" gives the name of the file to be created and "format" gives the format of the output (currently 'Atom' or 'RSS').

cache_dir

This if you give a directory name in this option then perlanet will use the cache facility of URI::Fetch. This means that web feeds will only be downloaded when they change.

feeds

This mandatory option gives details of the web feeds to be aggregated. Each item on the list has one mandatory sub-option and two optional sub-options. The mandatory sub-option is "url" which gives the URL of the feed. The optional sub-option "title" gives a title to the feed which can be used to identify the entries that originate from this feed. The optional "web" sub-option gives a web site URL associated with the feed (often the address of the web site that the feed comes from). This can be used to create a list of the aggregated sites. The "web" sub-option becomes mandatory if you are creating an OPML file. You can also add a "max_entries" option which will override the global "entries_per_feed" setting. If this setting exists and is set to zero, then the output feed will contain all of the entries from this input feed.

Example Configuration File

  title: planet test
  description: A Test Planet
  url: http://planet.example.com/
  author:
    name: Dave Cross
    email: dave@dave.org.uk
  entries: 20
  opml: opml.xml
  page:
    file: index.html
    template: index.tt
  feed:
    file: atom.xml
    format: Atom
  cache_dir: /tmp/feeds
  feeds:
    - url: http://blog.dave.org.uk/atom.xml
      title: Dave's Blog
      web: http://blog.dave.org.uk/
    - url: http://use.perl.org/~davorg/journal/rss
      title: Dave's use.perl Journal
      web: http://use.perl.org/~davorg/journal/
    - url: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/feed/31?au=2607
      title: Dave on O'Reillynet
      web: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2607

Output Template

The web page is created from a Template Toolkit template. This template is passed two variables.

feed

This is the XML::Feed object which has been used to create the aggregated feed. See the XML::Feed documentation for details of the data that is held in this object.

cfg

This is the contents of the configuration file, converted to a (nested) Perl hash.

Example Output Template

This is a simple template which uses the "feed" variable to display details of the aggregated feeds.

  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
      "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <html>
    <head>
      <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
      <title>[% feed.title %]</title>
    </head>
    <body>
      <h1>[% feed.title | html %]</h1>
      <p>[% feed.description | html %]</p>
  [% FOREACH entry IN feed.entries %]
      <h2><a href="[% entry.link | url | html %]">[% entry.title | html %]</h2></a>
      [% entry.content.body %]
  [% IF entry.author OR entry.issued %]
      <p>Published[% IF entry.author %] by [% entry.author | html; END %]
      [% IF entry.issued %] on [% entry.issued | html; END %]</p>
  [% END %]
  [% END %]
      <hr />
      <address>[% feed.author | html %] / [% feed.modified | html %]</address>
    </body>
  </html>

In the future, the Perlanet wiki at <http://wiki.github.com/davorg/perlanet> will contain a cookbook of useful ideas to include in the output template.