Feedgregator
The Blogs.GotDotNet.Com feed is using the new feedgregator engine that I've been playing around with lately. The main benefit of the new feedgregator engine is that I have complete control over how things are being done (aka no third party components). The latest blogs.gotdotnet.com feed now includes the full post body so you don't have to double click to view entries for those bloggers who don't put the full post in the description field of their feed.
http://www.emxtechnologies.com/gotdotnet-blogs/mainfeed.xml
If there is anything missing from this feed please let me know. I'll be more then happy to add it. Sometime soon I'll probably open up the Feedgregator workspace to the public. Before doing so I hope to:
- Add Pre/Post aggregation tasks
- More extensibility points
- ...
I almost forgot to mention that you can filter the items that are included in an aggregated feed by adding a <keywords>Whidbey, Avalon</keywords> tag to the Feedgregator config file. Feedgregator will look for the string in the title and description of the Rss Item and if found the item will be included in the final feed.
If anyone is interested in trying out Feedgregator you can grab the install for it at:
www.emxtechnologies.com/feedgregator/feedgregatorsetup.msi
The setup installs the Feedgregator core dll's, the Feedgregator Service, as well as the Feedgregator Console application. Feedgregator uses a slightly modified version of the Rss.NET components as well as log4net. The feedgregator.config file has one entry for the blogs.gotdotnet.com feed so if you want to add additional “feedgregator feeds” just add another entry to the config file. I think the properties specified in the config file are pretty self explanatory but in case not below is a brief overview:
opmlPath - The path to the opml file containing all the feed to aggregate into the single Feedgregator Feed.
title - The title for the aggregated feed.
link - The value for the link file in the generated Rss.
numberOfItems - The number of items to include in the feed.
outputFile - The location the generated feed should be output.
updateInterval - The number of seconds between updates.
<feedgregator>
<feedgregatorFeeds>
<feedgregatorFeed>
<opmlPath>http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/blogs.opml</opmlPath>
<title>Blogs@GotDotNet Unofficial Feed</title>
<link>http://www.emxtechnologies.com/gotdotnetblogs/mainfeed.xml</link>
<numberOfItems>50</numberOfItems>
<outputFile>c:\Inetpub\wwwroot\gotdotnet-feed.xml</outputFile>
<updateInterval>30</updateInterval> <!-- in seconds -->
</feedgregatorFeed>
</feedgregatorFeeds>
</feedgregator>
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions please leave them in the comments. For a little more background on Feedgregator check out my original entry on Feedgregator.
Last week while I was working on some minor enhancement to the unofficial blogs.gotdotnet.com main feed it occured to me that rather then coding it for a particular set of blogs I should make it more generic so that I could use it for any set of blogs that I want to combine into a single feed. The result of this thought is Feedgregator. Feedgregator allows you to create an OPML file with a list of blogs that you would like combined into a single feed. The configuration file for Feedgregator allows you to define the path to the OPML file with all the blogs you would like combined into a single feed, the title for your combined feed, the final url (link) that the feed will be available from, the number of items that should be returned in the feed, and finally the output path for the resulting xml feed. Oh and by the way I'm not set on the name so if anyone has any ideas for a better name I'd love to hear them! More to come...
Current Feedgregator Config File
Side Note: When I tried to load the weblogs.asp.net and dnj opml files I recieved a "There is no Unicode byte order mark. Cannot switch to Unicode." error. Can anyone provide any guideance on why I might be recieving this?