WIP: Add RSS Reporter with feedgen

[georgjaehnig]

Hello, because needing it myself, I've picked up the work on the RSS reporter (#553, #76, #53). I tried a very basic approach: Simply take the STDOUT output and wrap it into an RSS feed with 1 item.

Here's an example output.

If urlwatch now runs e.g. once a day, then in my feedreader I get this new item once per day. When using on online feed reader like Feedly, the old entries get saved by Feedly anyway.

Creating different feeds for different jobs should also be possible via

urlwatch 1 > 1.xml
urlwatch 2 > 2.xml

I think this is very much "good enough", much better than no RSS feed at all. But of course I'm happy to polish this up if there are some low-hanging fruits. :)

[thp]

Wonder if it could be better to configure the output file in the settings instead of writing to stdout? You could e.g. allow format strings to write per-feed files:

    output_filename: 'everything.rss'

vs

    output_filename: 'feed_{name}.rss'

(where {name} would be taken from the "name" field in the job list)

If you use output_filename.format(**job) (and job is the YAML dict) then you could even have custom keys and insert those into the filenames.

One important thing there would of course be to "collect" all jobs that map to the same filename and generate the feed once.

[thp]

@georgjaehnig Did you have time to look at the PR review comment?

[georgjaehnig]

Hi! Yes, I've read it back then – but in the meantime I was more concerned with the fact that (at least) Feedly does not recognize new items: Even if the content differed, it did not show a new item. Still have to work on this.

About the idea with configuring the output file: I'm not sure if I understand the benefit. Can I achieve something more with this than just by taking STDOUT and redirecting it with > to the file of my desire?

[thp]

About the idea with configuring the output file: I'm not sure if I understand the benefit. Can I achieve something more with this than just by taking STDOUT and redirecting it with > to the file of my desire?

You can have multiple feeds (e.g. "ebay.rss", "news.rss", ...)

[georgjaehnig]

You can have multiple feeds (e.g. "ebay.rss", "news.rss", ...)

But I could achieve that already with STDOUT, like this, no?

urlwatch ebay > ebay.rss
urlwatch news > news.rss

[thp]

@Jamstah What do you think of this PR? Do you think we should clean it up and get it merged or just close unmerged for now?

[georgjaehnig]

I'd be also happy if this moved on. :) Sorry for leaving this dormant. But I can help now again.

[Jamstah]

I think the main issue with using stdout is that we have another reporter called stdout.

I would agree that there should be a path to output to. If the user wants to use stdout for it, they can always set the path to /dev/stdout

I'm guessing you'll be running this on a webserver so you can point RSS readers at it anyway.