Puberty is never quite easy. RssFwd has taken a baby step to v0.2 today.. a complete rewrite.

In Ruby. In Rails actually. Source code available here [update: all downloads are here]. Feel free to give it a try. I won't spam you, promise.

The original TODO list included a web-interface to listing, subscribing and other end-user related activities which will be too boring to do with hand-coded file/database access, request, response, blah blah. So, decided to piggyback on rails' framework - which is a pretty pleasant experience.

I'm not using any RSS/Atom APIs here, partly because Ruby support for RSS or Atom, etc is quite rudimentary and considering the many RSS versions + Atom formats to support.. I think I'm better off with a standards-ignorant (lenient) feed reader. Any problems with anybody's feed? Let me know. Fixing is not hard at all.

Update:

Take RssFwd with you

Subscribe to any feed, anywhere you go - with bookmarklets.
  1. Right-click and bookmark this link: RF Preview This!
  2. Go to any RSS/Atom page (e.g. Experiment with target="_blank">this feed )
  3. Click on your new bookmarks
  4. That's it!
    RF Preview This! : You get a readable format immediately and the option to subscribe.

Now go, syndicate the planet..

Slight changes to my framework libraries though.. not entirely sure if they're bugs, changing them works for me.. so.. here they are:

Changed activerecord/lib/active_record/base.rb (sanitize)
old: object.to_s.gsub(/([;:])/, "").gsub('##', '##').gsub(/'/, "''") # ' (for ruby-mode)
new: object.to_s.gsub(/(;|:)/, "\\\\\\\&").gsub('##', '##').gsub(/'/, "''") # ' (for ruby-mode)

strange why I need so many \ but the idea is to escape into \; or \: instead of blatantly removing the ; or : characters. Spent quite sometime tracking it down this one (cock eyed) when my WHERE url = '%s' didn't work as expected ;-)

Also, changed http-access2/http.rb (set_header)

old: set('Host', "#{@request_uri.host}:#{@request_uri.port}")
new: set('Host', "#{@request_uri.host}")
set('Host', "#{@request_uri.host}:#{@request_uri.port}") unless @request_uri.port = 80

apparently rubyforge.org (sic) had problems with the host:port format and kept returning me HTTP 302, with the same Location: value. This naturally freaked out my HTTPAccess2::Client object. The new host-only header works.. so -shrugs- not sure who is the broken one.

Hm. Did I mention, RssFwd is GPL ?

TODO:
  1. Integrate with RSSScraper or something easier, so that any webpage can be syndicated.
  2. Allow server-mode at port 110, ala rss2email? Is it truely easier for non-techies?
  3. Show latest few polled articles from all sources (copyright infringements?)
  4. W3C-compliant style image links to easily indicate subscribe-able feeds.
  5. Work on conserving bandwidth