[gopher] Introducing Gopherfeed

[Luke Maurits]

Greetings list,

I thought folks here might care to hear about a new free software
project of mine, called Gopherfeed
(https://github.com/lmaurits/gopherfeed).  As the name suggests, it's a
tool for converting RSS/Atom feeds into Gophermaps, which can make it
very easy to quickly set up a gopher interface to existing material
online, or to use a gopher client as a minimalist feed reader.  You can
see an example of the sort of thing Gophermap can do at
gopher://luke.maurits.id.au/1feeds.  That page is updated hourly from a
cron job with a single command.

I have just released Gopherfeed 1.2, which is the result of about a
week of testing and debugging on my own site.  While Gopherfeed is
probably still far from bullet-proof, I think it should be fairly
robust by now, with all the most obvious bugs worked out.

There are more advanced features I would like to add (like using
etags / Last-Modified headers to avoid fetching feeds which haven't
changed since last time, and using multiple threads to speed up pulling
down large numbers of feeds), but before I dive into that I want to
make sure that the Gopher side of things is working well, since I'm
fairly new to Gopher technology.

I would appreciate if interested people could give Gopherfeed a spin
and let me know how it works with various gopher servers and clients
and on various OSes and Python versions, since my own testing has been
pretty limited.

Gopherfeed has been uploaded to PyPi, so if you have
setuptools, distutils, pip or anything like that installed you should
be able to install it simply via:

easy_install gopherfeed
or
pip install gopherfeed
etc.

Once installed, you can get usage instructions by just running
"gopherfeed" with no arguments, or you can see the README file on
Github.

Hope this is of use/interest to some of the people here.

Cheers,
Luke

-- 
Luke Maurits <luke at maurits.id.au>
http://www.luke.maurits.id.au
CompCogSci | Crypto | Maths | Python | Unix