rawdog: RSS Aggregator Without Delusions Of Grandeur
Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org>

rawdog is an RSS (and other) feed aggregator, based on Mark Pilgrim's flexible
feed parser. It's just an aggregator; it's not a weblog authoring tool, nor is
it an NNTP gateway, outliner, mailserver or anything else.  rawdog probably
only runs on Unix-like systems.

(Important: If you're upgrading from rawdog 1.x to rawdog 2.x, please
read the NEWS file to find out how to convert your rawdog state file.)

rawdog requires Python 2.2 or later. rawdog itself doesn't need any
additional modules to be installed, but it uses distutils for
installation, so if you're on a Debian system you'll need to install the
"python-dev" package first.

rawdog reads articles from a number of feeds and writes out a single
HTML file, based on a template either provided by the user or generated
by rawdog, containing the latest articles it's seen. It uses the ETags
and Last-Modified headers to avoid fetching a file that hasn't changed,
and supports gzip compression to reduce bandwidth when it has. It is
configured from a simple text file; the only state kept between
invocations that can't be reconstructed from the feeds is the ordering
of articles.

To install rawdog on your system, use distutils -- "python setup.py install".
This will install the library modules that rawdog needs, and will install the
"rawdog" binary that you can use to run it. (If you want to install to a
non-standard prefix, read the help provided by "python setup.py install
--help".)

rawdog needs a config file to function. Make the directory ".rawdog" in your
$HOME directory, copy the provided file "config" into that directory, and edit
it to suit your preferences. (Comments in that file describe what each of the
options does.) You should copy the provided file "style.css" into the same
directory that you've told rawdog to write its HTML output to. (rawdog should
be usable from a browser that doesn't support CSS, but it won't be very
pretty.)

When you invoke rawdog from the command line, you give it a series of actions
to perform -- for instance, "rawdog --update --write" tells it to do the
"--update" action, then the "--write" action. The actions supported are
as follows:

"--update" (or "-u"): Fetch data from the feeds and store it. This could
take some time if you've got lots of feeds.

"--write" (or "-w"): Write out the HTML output file.

"--list" (or "-l"): List brief information about each of the feeds that
was known about when "--update" was last done.

"--update-feed SOMEURL" (or "-f SOMEURL"), where SOMEURL is the URL of a
known feed: Update that feed immediately, even if its period hasn't
elapsed since it was last updated. This is useful if you're trying to
debug your own feed.

"--config FILE" (or "-c FILE"), where FILE is an absolute path or a path
relative to your .rawdog directory: Read FILE as an additional config
file; any options provided in FILE will override those already set in
the main config file (with the exception of "feed", which is
cumulative). Note that $HOME/.rawdog/config will still be read first
even if you specify this option. This is useful if you want rawdog to
write two different output files with different sets of options ("rawdog
-u -w -c config2 -w" will first update and write with the main config
file, then read config2, then write again).

"--show-template" (or "-t"): Print the template currently in use to
stdout. This is useful as a starting point if you want to modify your
own template: do "rawdog -t >~/.rawdog/mytemplate" with "template
default" in your config file, and you'll get a copy of the default
template to edit.

"--show-itemtemplate" (or "-T"): As for "--show-template", but for the
item template.

"--add URL" (or "-a URL"): Add a new feed to the config file. This uses
Mark Pilgrim's "feedfinder" module to try to figure out a feed for any
given URL, so you can usually just give it the URL of a blog's main
page, and it'll automatically detect the appropriate feed. (It'll tell
you if it can't guess a feed for the URL you give it.)

There are also the following options which may only be supplied once
(they're read before any of the actions are performed):

"--help": Provide a brief summary of all the options rawdog supports,
and exit.

"--dir DIR" (or "-d DIR"), where DIR is a directory: Use DIR instead of
the $HOME/.rawdog directory. This is useful if you want to have two or
more completely different rawdog setups with different sets of feeds;
just create a directory for each.

"--verbose" (or "-v"): Print more information about what rawdog's doing
while it's working. This is useful for tracking down problems.

"--no-locking" (or "-N"): Don't attempt to lock the state file. rawdog
usually claims a lock on the state file so that you can't have more than
one instance of rawdog running at the same time. Unfortunately, some
operating systems and filesystems don't support file locking; you can
use this option to disable locking if you're in that situation.

"--no-lock-wait" (or "-W"): If the state file lock can't be claimed
immediately, exit silently. Normally, rawdog will wait until it can
claim the lock, then run as usual; however, if you've got a very large
number of feeds and a slow machine or network connection, and you run
rawdog periodically from cron, then you may find you often have a number
of rawdog processes competing for the lock. In that situation, use this
option so that you've really only ever got one rawdog process running at
once.

"--upgrade OLDDIR NEWDIR": This option can be used to convert your state
file when upgrading from rawdog 1.x to rawdog 2.x; see the NEWS file for
more information. If you're not doing this, then it won't be of any use
to you.

You will want to run "rawdog -uw" periodically to fetch data and write
the output file. The easiest way to do this is to add a crontab entry
that looks something like this:

0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * *        /path/to/rawdog -uw

(If you don't know how to use cron, then "man crontab" is probably a good
start.) This will run rawdog every ten minutes.

If you want rawdog to fetch URLs through a proxy server, then set your
"http_proxy" environment variable appropriately; depending on your version of
cron, putting something like:

http_proxy=http://myproxy.mycompany.com:3128/

at the top of your crontab should be appropriate. (The http_proxy variable will
work for many other programs too.)

In the event that rawdog gets horribly confused (for instance, if your system
clock has a huge jump and it thinks it won't need to fetch anything for the
next thirty years), you can forcibly clear its state by removing the
~/.rawdog/state file (and the ~/.rawdog/feeds/*.state files, if you've
got the "splitstate" option turned on).

If you don't like the appearance of rawdog, then customise the style.css file.
If you come up with one that looks much better than the existing one, please
send it to me!

This should, hopefully, be all you need to know. If rawdog breaks in
interesting ways, please tell me at the email address at the top of this file.

