feedgenerator is a simple tool to create news feeds from various sources.

About feedgenerator

feedgenerator reads websites and existing news feeds and creates news feeds in Atom format based on their content. Currently implemented feeds:

  • Antenne Muenster : Creates a feed from the news website of the local radio station.
  • Deutschlandfunk : Creates a full-text feed from the teaser-only feed of the news website and allows to remove unwanted content
  • Heise : Creates a full-text feed from one or more teaser-only feeds of the it news website and allows to remove unwanted content

Development

feedgenerator is written in Python. The source code can be downloaded from the public Git repository. For development you need a recent version of Python 3. Requirements are documented in requirements.txt.

I use zipapp to build and deploy feedgenerator to my server. The build is done in four easy steps:

git clone https://git.ortlepp.eu/feedgenerator.git/
cd feedgenerator
pip3 install --upgrade -r requirements.txt --target feedgenerator/
python3 -m zipapp feedgenerator/

Usage

If the tool was built as stated in the Development section, you can run it by simply calling python3 feedgenerator.pyz. You can place a file feedgenerator.ini in the same directory. In this file you can configure the filenames of the feeds, the number of entries in the feeds and the content filters. The Git repository contains a sample configuration file.

The feeds created by feedgenerator are stored as XML files on local disc. It is a good idea to set up an hourly cron job to re-create the feed files regularly with to most recent content.

Roadmap

My plan is to implement some more features. Currently planned features are:

  • Implement a feed for Twitter profiles