DogWalker: walk your rawdog via ftp

A web based RSS aggregator for the price of 10 minutes work

Legaleze:
  • Dogwalker contains a patched version of Adam Sampson's rawdog V1.9 (which, in turn, contains Mark pilgrim's feedparser).
  • All code (including Zzzen's patch and the rest of the dogwalker package) is distributed under the GPL license.
  • This is not supposed to work, so don't come crying to us if it doesn't.

"I don't have a site, but want my own RSS aggregator page"

Here's how you do it:

  1. Open a site on geocities, tripod or whatever 1
  2. If on windows - download and install python (http://python.org/download). If you're running a less primitive OS, chances are you already have python.
  3. Download dogwalker and open it somewhere. (It would unzip to a directory called dogwalker, but feel free to rename it).
  4. Edit dogwalker.py for ftp host and user (you'll be prompted for the password each time you run the script).
  5. Edit htmlconf/config and decide which rss feeds you want
  6. You can also edit htmlconf/htmltemplate.html, rawdog.css, wmlconf/ for a wap 2 version, and many other things in order to personalize your dog to your tase, but let's leave all this for later.
  7. Doubleclick on dogwalker.py (not rawdog.py), you'll be prompted for the ftp password.
  8. Sit back and enjoy the show

"I have a site, and I can run scheduled tasks there (e.g. with crontab)" 3

  1. Download dogwalker and open it somewhere. (It would unzip to a directory called dogwalker, but feel free to rename it).
  2. Configure as explained in steps 5-6 above
  3. Add crontab entries similar to these:
0,20,40 * * * *   /path/to/dogwalker/rawdog.py -uwd /path/to/dogwalker/htmlconf
10,30,50 * * * *  /path/to/dogwalker/rawdog.py -uwd /path/to/dogwalker/wmlconf
Enjoy,
Guy & Nimrod.
[1]

Security note: Best is to open a new and "expendable" site even if you do have a site. Dogwalker uses ftp, and ftp is a protocol that shouts out to the world "come and hack my site".

For your important sites, use scp or the free software winscp if your host providers support scp or sftp protocols, (or scream bloody murder if they don't). Once you start using scp/winscp, change your password and you'll sleep much better.
[2]Couldn't get wap to work on tripod. Although there is a file at https://rawfish7.tripod.com/rawdog.wml, there's no way to edit .htaccess or any other option to define a text/vnd.wap.wml header for it. We could do rawgod-wml.cgi as a perl script (would work for tripod), but that's too specific and we do have wap pages (e.g. zzzen.com/wap), so what the heck.
[3]If you don't understand the title of this section, simply skip it ;)