RSS Feed Readers Part II - Rawdog

I’ve recently been playing around with feedreaders, and how I get my data from the web. After playing around with FreshRss I went back to tinkering around with Rawdog which presents the data as a river-of-news, in a stylish web 1.0 format.

The output of the tool is a single html page that contains all of the articles in date order, with no method to mark items as read/unread. This may sound like a -ve, though I have an idea that if I can’t get though all teh article to read in one day, then I’m suffering from information overload and it may force me to take action.

Setup

This was quite strightforward, basically install and then add feeds into the config file. There are many settings in there which can be tweaked. To run, I just execute:

rawdog -uvw

This outputs an html file, which can then be copied only my local nginx server I had set up. This process would probably be scripted, amd then put on a CRON.

The output looks something like this:

Plugins

The tool has many plug-ins that allow the feed to be tailored to your taste. Stuff like applying filters to disregard articles containing certain words. Group by feeed instead of date. Execute commands before/after fetching feeds. The plug-ins are written in python and quite understandable and API well documented, so I could write my own if I think I need a custom action.

One plugin I was playing around with filtered articles. It worked well, all I had to do was update the config file as follows:

feed 3h https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCzQUP1qoWDoEbmsQxvdjxgQ 
	filter hide ; show title "(i?)xperience #" ; hide title "est of" ; hide summary "(i?)comedian" 

Pros

• Written in python
• Highly configurable and well documented
• Many plugins exist already.
• Can output xml for another reader ie Radwog for filtering etc / FreshRss for display.
• Can output single html with all feeds in it, no need to go to sites.

Cons

• Dated look
• Doesn’t track read/unread items

I’ll probably keep playing around with this, though not sure I’ll use it.

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