Comments on: Agile RSS Aggregator in Ruby

By: Ilya Grigorik

Ilya Grigorik — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:05:52 +0000

Keith, that’s a hard one to diagnose without more information, but by the sounds of it, either it hangs on downloading external data (big feed?) or it can’t open the connection at all. Since it could be either or, try adding some debugging output into the process to see where it’s stalling.

By: keith

keith — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:40:20 +0000

Kind of a noob question here but… I’m running the script from command line on a server, initially got the errors requiring erubis and feed-normalizer, but got those installed and added require ‘rubygems’, then changed the Mongrel::HttpServer params to (”0.0.0.0″, “3000″) to get past “Address already in use” error.

So, now the script executes without errors, but simply stops at some point, before outputting a file. Guessing that it opens the connection, but then leaves it open and just waits. Checking the processes running on the server shows the script continuing, and only killing the PID will terminate it…

Any ideas?

By: Ilya Grigorik

Ilya Grigorik — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:22:12 +0000

raghubetter: I believe all of those gems are on rubyforge, try that instead.

By: raghubetter

raghubetter — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:05:18 +0000

I am unable to find these gems, so when i do gem sources -a github, url… its says not processing ……. please help me with all required dependencies..

By: Ilya Grigorik

Ilya Grigorik — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 23:50:34 +0000

Tereza, I wouldn’t use this as a general purpose feed reader, there are probably easier to use solutions out there. Having said that, if you want to set it up: download all the files, ensure that all the gems are installed (gem install name), create a feeds.txt file which contains the urls of the RSS feeds you want to fetch, and then run the aggregator (ruby file.rb). Once that is running, open your browser and point it to: http://localhost. If you see a web page, success!

By: Pelkin

Pelkin — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 22:31:23 +0000

Hey, Tereza, not sure if this will help, but I would first try and get this up and running on your local machine. This is what is meant by “localhost.” It seems to help me when I set something up locally before I push it “Live” onto the server. It might also help if you provided who you are hosting your web with, maybe someone here hosts there and can give you some quick instructions on how to get started.

By: david

david — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:45:01 +0000

great work! I’ve easily get the RSS Aggregator running, but haven’t been able to fetch the images from the feeds - is it possible to do so? thanks!

By: Tereza

Tereza — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:13:48 +0000

I am a newbie. Started working on news aggregators fro my site just recently. Your rss feeder sounds great. Can anyone tell me in plain language how to go about getting this to work. My hosting provider has Ruby Gems and Ruby on Rails, and I don’t have a clue on how it works. I’ve downloaded feedtools and feedreader gems and could not figure it out. The files are usually placed in Ruby directory instead of public_html, which is where I’ve uploaded your Rss-Aggregator to. Any hints would be challenging. What do you mean “simply run the feed.rb, and then point your browser to http://localhost.” If you can clue me in somehow I would appreciate it. Thanks.

By: S Woodside

S Woodside — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:57:51 +0000

Hi Ilya, Based on your advice I originally wrote my aggregator at http://simonwoodside.com/ using feed_normalizer. Since then I’ve found that it doesn’t do a very good job of handling crappy feeds, like the one that I pull in from flickr. So I switched to FeedTools, which is great but really slow. I finally developed a complete solution (in Rails) for feed aggregation (with cache). Hopefully people will find it useful.

By: Ilya Grigorik

Ilya Grigorik — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:25:20 +0000

AP, glad you got it working!