I maintain a couple of small "planet" sites. If you are not familiar with planets, they are sites that aggregate RSS/Atom feeds for a group of people related somehow. It makes for a nice, single, thematic feed.

Recently, when changing them from one server to another, everything broke. Old posts were new, feeds that had not been updated in 2 years were always with all its posts on top... a disaster.

I could have gone to the old server, and started debugging why rawdog was doing that, or switch to planet, or look for other software, or use an online aggregator.

Instead, I started thinking... I had written a few RSS aggregators in the past... Feedparser is again under active development... rawdog and planet seem to be pretty much abandoned... how hard could it be to implement the minimal planet software?

Well, not all that hard, that's how hard it was. Like it took me 4 hours, and was not even difficult.

One reason why this was easier than what planet and rawdog achieved is that I am not doing a static site generator, because I already have one so all I need this program (I called it Smiljan) to do is:

Parse a list of feeds and store it in a database if needed.
Download those feeds (respecting etag and modified-since).
Parse those feeds looking for entries (feedparser does that).
Load those entries (or rather, a tiny subset of their data) in the database.
Use the entries to generate a set of files to feed Nikola
Use nikola to generate and deploy the site.

So, here is the final result: http://planeta.python.org.ar which still needs theming and a lot of other stuff, but works.

I implemented Smiljan as 3 doit tasks, which makes it very easy to integrate with Nikola (if you know Nikola: add "from smiljan import *" in your dodo.py and a feeds file with the feed list in rawdog format) and voilá, running this updates the planet:

doit load_feeds update_feeds generate_posts deploy

Here is the code for smiljan.py, currently at the "gross hack that kinda works" stage. Enjoy!

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import codecs
import datetime
import glob
import os
import sys

import feedparser
import peewee

class Feed(peewee.Model):
    name = peewee.CharField()
    url = peewee.CharField(max_length = 200)
    last_status = peewee.CharField()
    etag = peewee.CharField(max_length = 200)
    last_modified = peewee.DateTimeField()

class Entry(peewee.Model):
    date = peewee.DateTimeField()
    feed = peewee.ForeignKeyField(Feed)
    content = peewee.TextField(max_length = 20000)
    link = peewee.CharField(max_length = 200)
    title = peewee.CharField(max_length = 200)
    guid = peewee.CharField(max_length = 200)

Feed.create_table(fail_silently=True)
Entry.create_table(fail_silently=True)

def task_load_feeds():

    def add_feed(name, url):
        f = Feed.create(
            name=name,
            url=url,
            etag='caca',
            last_modified=datetime.datetime(1970,1,1),
            )
        f.save()

    feed = name = None
    for line in open('feeds'):
        line = line.strip()
        if line.startswith('feed'):
            feed = line.split(' ')[2]
        if line.startswith('define_name'):
            name = ' '.join(line.split(' ')[1:])
        if feed and name:
            f = Feed.select().where(name=name, url=feed)
            if not list(f):
                yield {
                    'name': name,
                    'actions': ((add_feed,(name, feed)),),
                    'file_dep': ['feeds'],
                    }
                name = feed = None

def task_update_feeds():

    def update_feed(feed):
        modified = feed.last_modified.timetuple()
        etag = feed.etag
        parsed = feedparser.parse(feed.url,
            etag=etag,
            modified=modified
        )
        try:
            feed.last_status = str(parsed.status)
        except:  # Probably a timeout
            # TODO: log failure
            return
        if parsed.feed.get('title'):
            print parsed.feed.title
        else:
            print feed.url
        feed.etag = parsed.get('etag', 'caca')
        modified = tuple(parsed.get('date_parsed', (1970,1,1)))[:6]
        print "==========>", modified
        modified = datetime.datetime(*modified)
        feed.last_modified = modified
        feed.save()
        # No point in adding items from missinfg feeds
        if parsed.status > 400:
            # TODO log failure
            return
        for entry_data in parsed.entries:
            print "========================================="
            date = entry_data.get('updated_parsed', None)
            if date is None:
                date = entry_data.get('published_parsed', None)
            if date is None:
                print "Can't parse date from:"
                print entry_data
                return False
            date = datetime.datetime(*(date[:6]))
            title = "%s: %s" %(feed.name, entry_data.get('title', 'Sin título'))
            content = entry_data.get('description',
                    entry_data.get('summary', 'Sin contenido'))
            guid = entry_data.get('guid', entry_data.link)
            link = entry_data.link
            print repr([date, title])
            entry = Entry.get_or_create(
                date = date,
                title = title,
                content = content,
                guid=guid,
                feed=feed,
                link=link,
            )
            entry.save()
    for feed in Feed.select():
        yield {
            'name': feed.name.encode('utf8'),
            'actions': ((update_feed,(feed,)),),
            }

def task_generate_posts():

    def generate_post(entry):
        meta_path = os.path.join('posts',str(entry.id)+'.meta')
        post_path = os.path.join('posts',str(entry.id)+'.txt')
        with codecs.open(meta_path, 'wb+', 'utf8') as fd:
            fd.write(u'%s\n' % entry.title.replace('\n', ' '))
            fd.write(u'%s\n' % entry.id)
            fd.write(u'%s\n' % entry.date.strftime('%Y/%m/%d %H:%M'))
            fd.write(u'\n')
            fd.write(u'%s\n' % entry.link)
        with codecs.open(post_path, 'wb+', 'utf8') as fd:
            fd.write(u'.. raw:: html\n\n')
            content = entry.content
            if not content:
                content = 'Sin contenido'
            for line in content.splitlines():
                fd.write(u'    %s' % line)

    for entry in Entry.select().order_by(('date', 'desc')):
        yield {
            'name': entry.id,
            'actions': ((generate_post, (entry,)),),
            }

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