[Sussex] RSS emailer

[Ronan Chilvers]

On Thu, 7 Jul 2005 11:57:38 +0100
Steve Dobson <steve at dobson.org> wrote:

> 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

Thanks Steve.  I'm alright with cron - use it lots here.  Nice idea to
use wget, but I want it formatted rather than raw.  I think I'll have a
play with php5's simplexml and see what I can come up with...

Cheers

Ronan
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