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dbagg2, a personal news aggregator toolkit
l.m.orchard <deus_x@pobox.com>
http://www.decafbad.com/cvs/dbagg2
$Header: /cvsroot/dbagg2/README,v 1.3 2004/01/23 14:46:44 deusx Exp $
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Welcome to my second experiment in writing an aggregator in Python.
Be warned that things are in an interesting, yet barely functional,
state.  The goal of this little kit is to make it easy to get an
aggregator up and running in order to spend time tinkering with new
ideas in GUI, presenting information, aggregation patterns, and other
such things.

Although it could someday be packaged up as an end-user aggregator,
this is by no means the main goal.

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INSTALLATION
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You're going to need the following prerequisites:

    * Some UNIX-y OS (ie. Linux, *BSD, OS X, etc.)
    * Python 2.3
    * MySQL
    * Apache
    * MySQLdb - http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python
    * SQLObject - http://sqlobject.org/
    * SimpleTAL - http://www.owlfish.com/software/simpleTAL/

Once you have those installed, you'll need to create a new database and
user.  For example:

    $ mysqladmin -uroot -ppasswd create dbagg2
    $ mysql -uroot -ppasswd -e'GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON dbagg2.* \
        TO dbagg2@localhost IDENTIFIED BY "somepass"'

Then, you'll need to update conf/global.conf with the details used in
creating the database: 

    [data]
    driver = mysql

    [data_mysql]
    host   = localhost
    db     = dbagg2
    user   = dbagg2
    passwd = somepass

After that, you can initialize the database tables used:

    $ export PYTHONPATH=./lib
    $ python lib/dbagg2/model.py createTables

At this point you should get a list of feeds in an OPML file, assuming
that you have been using another aggregator.  You can then import
these feeds:

    $ python lib/dbagg2/OPMLImport.py mySubscriptions.opml

Once the database is populated with feeds, scans can begin.  This
is done via crontab:

    30 * * * * (cd /path/to/dbagg2; PYTHONPATH=./lib python lib/dbagg2/scan.py;)

In order to view things, you'll need to make htdocs/ available via
your web server.  In Apache, you'll want to make an alias to the
htdocs/ directory, or symlink somewhere.

To view new items:

    http://localhost/path/to/dbagg2/htdocs/index.cgi?method=newItems

You can use this as a bookmarklet for subscribing to sites, with some tweaking
of the URL to your aggregator installation:

    javascript:void(location.replace('http://localhost/~deusx/dbagg2/?
    method=sourcesManage&action_add=1&url='+escape(document.location)));

Or, just go to this URL to add a source manually:

    http://localhost/dbagg2/htdocs/index.cgi?method=sourcesManage

Share and Enjoy!