NAME

       perlanet - command line interface to Perlanet.pm

SYNOPSIS

         $ perlanet

       Or

         $ perlanet config_file

DESCRIPTION

       "perlanet" is a command line program for aggregating web feeds (both Atom and RSS) and publishing a new
       web page and a new web feed containing the results of that aggregation.

COMMAND LINE ARGUMENTS

       "perlanet" takes one optional command line argument, which is the name of a configuration file to use. If
       no filename is given then the program looks for a file called "perlanetrc" in the current directory.

CONFIGURATION FILE

       "perlanet" requires a configuration file which contains details of which feeds to aggregate and what to
       do with the results of the aggregation. By default, "perlanet" looks for a file called "perlanetrc" in
       the current directory, but this name can be overridden by passing the name of a different file when
       calling the program.

       The configuration file is in YAML format. YAML is a simple text-based file format. See <http://yaml.org/>
       for further details.

   Configuration Options
       The configuration file can contain the following options.

       title
           The title of the resulting page and web feed. This option is mandatory.

       description
           The description of the resulting page and web feed. This option is mandatory.

       url A URL which will be associated with the resulting page and web feed. This will usually be the address
           where the web page will be published. This option is mandatory.

       author
           The name and email address of the author of the aggregated content. This item has two sub-items - one
           each for the name and email address. This option is mandatory.

       agent
           This optional entry defines the agent string that perlanet will use when requesting data from web
           sites. It's the name of the program that site owners will see in their web site access logs. Although
           it is optional, it is strongly recommended that you give a value for this configuration option and
           that the value you use includes contact details so that web site owners can get in touch with you if
           they have any concerns about your use of their site.

       entries
           The maximum number of entries to include in the aggregated content. This option is mandatory.

       entries_per_feed
           The "entries" value above defines the total number of entries in the aggregated output feed. The
           <entries_per_feed> value defines the number of entries to take from each of your source feeds. For
           example, if this is set to 1 then there will only be one entry from each feed in your output.  If
           this value is 0 (or missing) then all values from all source feeds are used.

       entry_sort_order
           Entries have two dates, issued (which is the date that the item was first published) and modified
           (which is the date that the item was last updated).  This configuration option controls which of
           these two dates are used to sort the entries in a feed. It can be one of the two values "issued" or
           "modified". If this option is omitted, then "modified" is used.

       opml
           The system can optionally create an OPML file containing details of the feeds which are being
           aggregated. This optional option controls whether or not this file is created. If it exists, it
           should be the name of the OPML file to be created. If an OPML file is being created, then the "feeds"
           options (described below) will all require a "web" sub-option.

       page
           This mandatory option contains the details of the web page to be created.  There are two sub-options
           - "file" gives the name of the file to be created and "template" gives the name of a Template Toolkit
           template which will be processed in order to create this file. See the section "Output Template" for
           more details on this template, and the web site <http://tt2.org/> for more information about the
           Template Toolkit.

       feed
           This mandatory option contains the details of the web feed to be created.  There are two sub-options
           - "file" gives the name of the file to be created and "format" gives the format of the output
           (currently 'Atom' or 'RSS').

       cache_dir
           This if you give a directory name in this option then perlanet will use the cache facility of
           URI::Fetch. This means that web feeds will only be downloaded when they change.

       feeds
           This mandatory option gives details of the web feeds to be aggregated. Each item on the list has one
           mandatory sub-option and two optional sub-options.  The mandatory sub-option is "url" which gives the
           URL of the feed. The optional sub-option "title" gives a title which will be prepended to all of the
           entry titles taken from that feed. If no title is given, then the title will be taken from the feed
           title. The optional "web" sub-option gives a web site URL associated with the feed (often the address
           of the web site that the feed comes from). This can be used to create a list of the aggregated sites.
           The "web" sub-option becomes mandatory if you are creating an OPML file.

   Example Configuration File
         title: planet test
         description: A Test Planet
         url: http://planet.example.com/
         author:
           name: Dave Cross
           email: dave@dave.org.uk
         entries: 20
         opml: opml.xml
         page:
           file: index.html
           template: index.tt
         feed:
           file: atom.xml
           format: Atom
         cache_dir: /tmp/feeds
         feeds:
           - url: http://blog.dave.org.uk/atom.xml
             title: Dave's Blog
             web: http://blog.dave.org.uk/
           - url: http://use.perl.org/~davorg/journal/rss
             title: Dave's use.perl Journal
             web: http://use.perl.org/~davorg/journal/
           - url: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/feed/31?au=2607
             title: Dave on O'Reillynet
             web: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2607

   Output Template
       The web page is created from a Template Toolkit template. This template is passed two variables.

       feed
           This is the XML::Feed object which has been used to create the aggregated feed. See the XML::Feed
           documentation for details of the data that is held in this object.

       cfg This is the contents of the configuration file, converted to a (nested) Perl hash.

   Example Output Template
       This is a simple template which uses the "feed" variable to display details of the aggregated feeds.

         <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
             "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
         <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
         <html>
           <head>
             <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
             <title>[% feed.title %]</title>
           </head>
           <body>
             <h1>[% feed.title | html %]</h1>
             <p>[% feed.description | html %]</p>
         [% FOREACH entry IN feed.entries %]
             <h2><a href="[% entry.link | url | html %]">[% entry.title | html %]</h2></a>
             [% entry.content.body %]
         [% IF entry.author OR entry.issued %]
             <p>Published[% IF entry.author %] by [% entry.author | html; END %]
             [% IF entry.issued %] on [% entry.issued | html; END %]</p>
         [% END %]
         [% END %]
             <hr />
             <address>[% feed.author | html %] / [% feed.modified | html %]</address>
           </body>
         </html>

       In the future, the Perlanet wiki at <http://wiki.github.com/davorg/perlanet> will contain a cookbook of
       useful ideas to include in the output template.

SUPPORT

       To report bugs in Perlanet, please use the CPAN request tracker. You can either use the web page at
       <http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Report.html?Queue=Perlanet> or send an email to bug-Perlanet@rt.cpan.org.

SEE ALSO

       •   perlanet

       •   Plagger

AUTHOR

       Dave Cross, <dave@mag-sol.com>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

       Copyright (C) 2008 by Magnum Solutions Ltd.

       This progam library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as
       Perl itself, either Perl version 5.10.0 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have
       available.