Sporkmonger

IMPORTANT: FeedTools and FeedUpdater are currently being maintained by Sean Geoghegan.

FeedTools is a simple Ruby library for handling rss, atom, and cdf parsing, generation, and translation as well as caching. It attempts to adhere to Postel’s law—i.e. a liberal parsing and conservative generation policy.

It’s ideal for parsing RSS feeds in Ruby on Rails applications and equally useful in just simple scripts. FeedTools can also create new feeds for you in only a few lines of code.

You can find the project page for FeedTools on RubyForge here. Downloads are here. However, the preferred method of obtaining FeedTools is with RubyGems because of FeedTools’ dependancies on other gems. The API documentation is included with the gem. A brief tutorial is available here.

To obtain FeedTools with RubyGems,

gem install feedtools

Prefix with “sudo” as necessary.

Obviously, you’ll need RubyGems installed. If you’re on Windows, RubyGems should have been included in the One-Click Ruby Installer.

If you have issues with a missing Iconv library, on Windows, try this entry on the Rails wiki.

Don’t set the RUBYOPT environment variable unless you have a really good reason to do so.

FeedUpdater is a Ruby daemon for use with FeedTools that periodically updates a list of feeds, and allows arbitrary operations on the parsed feeds immediately after update.

You can find the project page for FeedUpdater on RubyForge here. Downloads are here. However, the preferred method of obtaining FeedUpdater is with RubyGems because it automatically sets up the executable. The API documentation is available with the gem.

To obtain FeedUpdater with RubyGems,

sudo gem install feedupdater

If you’re on Windows, FeedUpdater will probably not work.

Patches are always welcome!