[Sussex] RSS emailer

[Steve Dobson]

Ronan

On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 11:23:32AM +0100, Gareth Ablett wrote:
> From: Ronan Chilvers [mailto:ronan at thelittledot.com]
> Subject: [Sussex] RSS emailer
> > 
> > Hi folks
> > 
> > Does anyone know of a simple RSS grabber that will bundle up a set of
> > RSS feeds and email them to an address at regular intervals?
> 
> Personally I see as one of those things that would take some 30 minutes
> at the most to whip up combined with a cron job and hey presto you have
> it. And I'd probably end up using something like PHP to do it. So if you
> really get stuck and cant find anything, and have phpserver on that
> machine or any machine for that matter. Give me a shout.

I had the same idea as Gareth, but I didn't get the idea until after I
had deleted you post (I don't know of a pre-written app to do this).

But I think that its more like a 30 sec job than 30 mins!

The cron system will scheduling for you: 
  $ man cron
  $ man crontab
  $ man 5 crontab

And you can use wget to get the RSS file from the remote server.
  $ man wget

Your crontab entry should look something like this:

  5,35 8-22 * * * wget -O - http://www.groklaw.net/backend/GrokLaw.rdf
                        
  ^    ^    ^ ^ ^ ^     ^ ^
  |    |    | | | |     | +- Write output to standard out
  |    |    | | | |     +--- Redirect output to the name file (see above)
  |    |    | | | +--------- Command to run
  |    |    | | +----------- The day of the week  (* = every day)
  |    |    | +------------- The month of the year (* = every month)
  |    |    +--------------- The day of the month (* = all days)
  |    +-------------------- The hour of the day (8-22 - no point in 
  |                           running the command between 11pm & 7:59 am
  |                           when you're in bed asleep).
  +------------------------- The minute of the hour

Hope this helps
Steve


-- 
Lake Erie died for your sins.
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