pod_feeder

Publishes RSS/Atom feeds to Diaspora*

This is a lightweight, customizable "bot" script to harvest RSS/Atom feeds and re-publish them to the Diaspora social network. It is posted here without warranty, for public use.

Installation

In order to use this script, you must first create a sqlite database, which can be accomplished thusly:

$ echo "CREATE TABLE feeds(guid varchar(255) primary key,feed_id varchar(127),title varchar(255),link varchar(255),hashtags varchar(255),timestamp integer(10),posted integer(1));" | sqlite3 feeds.db

You must also have the following perl modules installed:

LWP::UserAgent
URI::Escape
HTML::Entities
JSON
XML::Simple
DBI
Unicode::Normalize
Getopt::Long

This script is intended to be run as a cron job, which might look something like this:

@hourly ~/pod_feeder.pl --feed-id myfeed --feed-url http://example.com/feeds/rss --pod-url https://diaspora.hzsogood.net --username user --password supersecretpassword --category-tags --title-tags > /dev/null 2>&1

Usage

-a   --aspect-id <id>                Aspects to share with. May specify multiple times (default: 'public')
-c   --category-tags                 Attempt to automatically hashtagify RSS item 'categories' (default: off)
-d   --database <sqlite file>        The SQLite file to store feed data (default: 'feed.db')
-e   --title-tags                    Automatically hashtagify RSS item title
-f   --feed-url <http://...>         The feed URL
-g   --user-agent <string>           Use this to spoof the user-agent if the feed blocks bots (ex: 'Mozilla/5.0')
-i   --feed-id <string>              An arbitrary identifier to associate database entries with this feed
-l   --pod-url <https://...>         The pod URL
-m   --timeout <hours>               How long (in hours) to keep attempting failed posts (default 72)
-o   --fetch-only                    Don't publish to Diaspora, just queue the new feed items for later
-p   --password <********>           The D* user password
-r   --url-tags                      Attempt to automatically hashtagify the RSS link URL (default: off)
-t   --auto-tag <#hashtag>           Hashtags to add to all posts. May be specified multiple times (default: none)
-u   --username <user>               The D* login username