[JDEV] RSS, WX transports?

[Ryan Eatmon]

Hehe... I think I'll take the time to describe what Meerkat-Service can
do... Actually I'll compare it against the old RSS-Agent and you can see
why I'm putting Rss-Agent on the back burner.

1) Meerkat fetches a *bunch* of RSS feeds and stores them a database,
where as Rss-Agent had to fetch the RSS feeds itself over and over
again.  This actually caused a problem and was not at all stable for
running on a server with lots of different feeds.

2) You can search Meerkat.  In fact, that's one of the really cool
things about the upcoming Meerkat-Service.  I've been subscribed to a
channel for a few days for any news article that contains the regular
expression /[Ll]inux/.  So I get every new article on Linux from every
channel.

3) You will be able to subscribe to each channel that Meerkat indexes,
or subscribe to a Collection.  See Meerkat for more info...

4) Meerkat allows for access via XML-RPC.  This goes through a web
address and *should* allow for you to run Meerkat-Service behind a
firewall that allows for http proxying.  I need to test this, but I
don't see anything about it that wouldn't work.

The only thing that you can't do with Meerkat-Service that you can do
with RSS-Agent is provide a custom feed to people behind a firewall.  A
feed that is not on the Internet.  To that end, I might need to keep
RSS-Agent around, but modify it to only provide a single feed, or
multiple feeds for local access.  (ie it wouldn't fetch it from a
website, but would access it from the local file system...)  Is there
interest for this sort of thing?

I think that's it...  Meerkat-Service will be amazingly powerful and
cool when I'm completely done with it.

-- 

Ryan Eatmon                   reatmon at jabber.org 
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