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May 9, 2005
Filtering MacUpdate/Versiontracker for YOUR updates
Operation Information Overload
In order to become more productive, it's a good idea to use automatic filters. Wouldn't it be good, for example, if those web sites that list updates for software (such as Versiontracker, or MacUpdate, or other sites with an RSS feed) only list the software that you might be interested in, because you've already installed it?
A generic RSS filter
You can get that (for free) by simply filtering their content automatically in your RSS reader. This will work with any RSS Reader program!
You need:
- A web server (optional)
- A unix system (OS X or Linux) or an especially equipped Windows box
- My little script filter-rss.cgi (download below)
- ...to know how install a local CGI or a cron job.
So you either need to know how to set up a cron job or, easier and technically better, you have a local web server running. Mac OS X users only have to click that "Web" button in the "Internet Sharing" panel to keep a little web server (Apache) running in the background (doesn't hurt you!). You need to ensure that it'll execute CGI scripts.
Then, you install my little script that acts as a filter (see below for download). On OS X, this could go into /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables, and you ought to do a "chmod +x filter-rss.cgi" on this file. If you've reconfigured the web server, this might need to go somewhere else.
Then, in your favorite RSS reader program, you just subscribe to a link to the cgi. For example, if you'd like to filter Versiontracker's output, subscribe to this feed:
http://localhost/cgi-bin/filter-rss.cgi?source=http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/recent.rss
You can try it out - after installing the CGI script - by clicking on the link.
The script automatically scans your /Applications directory (or whatever) in order to find out what software you have installed. This - and an optional file - serve as keyword list that is used to filter interesting content from the RSS stream.
You can configure it (open the file with a text editor!) to suit your needs. It'll run from a terminal nicely, and you can have it create a local file once an hour (using a cron job) if you prefer that over the webserver/CGI solution. Please don't install this if you're not familiar with the terminal of your system. It won't run on Windows without additional software. This is meant for Mac OS X and Linux.
Filter-RSS script - Download
Download file
Posted by dr at May 9, 2005 11:13 AM
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Comments
This is almost exactly what I am looking for. I've been searching around for a script to filter RSS by keywords in the title field.
Could you modify the script and add a mode so that it takes RSS from standard input, filters it, and then outputs the filtered RSS to standard output?
If you did this you would have a filter for the RSS reader "liferea".
(I tried to hack the script myself, but my Perl is below intro class level!)
Posted by: csights at December 9, 2005 9:29 PM