plutopluto 1.2.0

Description:

plutopluto 1.2.0

plutopluto - simple feed aggregator

Overview
Display posts from multiple feeds:
plutopluto http://xkcd.com/atom.xml http://what-if.xkcd.com/feed.atom
Display posts from a feed with multiple pages:
plutopluto http://staff.tumblr.com/page/{page}/rss
Load config (with urls) from separate file:
plutopluto -c config.cfg


History
When I stopped using facebook some years ago the only thing I missed was
getting a stream of interesting things. I really like just scrolling along and
look at some pictures, read some discussions and watch some videos.
So I started to look for alternatives. Pretty fast I realized that I did not
need a social network to a stream. The existing infrastructure of blogs with
RSS or atom feeds was more than enough for anything I wanted.
The only thing missing was a nice way to display these feeds in a stream. So
this is what I wanted to create: A stream-like feed reader.
Later I realized there is a second reason why I would want to use plutopluto:
Many blogs suck. Either they look plain ugly or they are unusable slow – which
happens especially with image-centered blogs. So I just fire up plutopluto
with the blog’s feed and have a nice and clean interface for scrolling through
the content.


Architecture
I originally implemented plutopluto in PHP. This is a rewrite in JavaScript.
Unfortunately, the cross origin policy prevents JavaScript from accessing
feeds directly. So there is a minimal python server which gets the feeds and
also converts them to JSON. I could have used a 3rd party service like the
google feed API for this, but I did not want to leak any data to google and
also I already had the required python code from another project.
The JavaScript code depends on jQuery. However, I wrote a minimal
reimplementation inspired by jqlite that is used instead. Why? Because it
was fun.


Design
The default design is minimalistic and pratical. It is simply a list of post
sorted by time. When you scroll to the bottom, more posts are loaded, so you
can just keep scrolling until no posts are left. Each post has a header
section with the publication time and the name of the source. When you click
on the source you go to the original post.
This design was inspired by soup.io and is also similar to tumblr.


Configuration
You can configure all flask related options as well as HOST, PORT
and URLS in a separate configuration file using plutopluto --config FILE. See example.cfg for an example. If no configurations is provided,
the file .plutopluto.cfg is tried, first in the current folder, then in
home.
Some options can be passed to plutopluto directly. See plutopluto --help.
If defined, they take precedence over those from the config file.


Extend/Hack
Everything about this project is meant to be simple. I am serious about this.
I really want the code to be as easy to understand and extend by as many people
as possible. If you see anything you don’t understand: Please create a bug
report.


FAQ

Why the name “plutopluto”?
There is some kind of a tradition of feed aggregators called this way:
planetplanet,
moonmoon

What is the favicon?
It’s a sad pluto. When I was a child, pluto was still considered a
planet.

The posts are not sorted correctly
Loading and parsing many feeds takes some time. So when the first posts are
displayed, many feeds have not yet finished. In fact, the first posts are
displayed as soon as the first feed is loaded. So the first few posts will
necessarily originate from the same source.

The stream always starts with the same source
See previous question.