Parsing RSS feeds

del.icio.us is a neat service for managing an online bookmark collection. With a little bit of Perl and a few CPAN modules, you can fetch your most recent bookmarks and include them as links on your homepage.

The sample script could be used in a cronjob and creates a file on you local server. It downloads my del.icio.us bookmark feed, chops it down to the ten most recent bookmarks and writes a unordered bullet list. You may need to adapt the template to your specific needs.

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#!/usr/local/perl/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
 
use LWP::Simple;
use XML::RSS;
use HTML::Template;
 
my $file = 'include_links.txt';
 
my @links;
my $tmpl = HTML::Template->new(filename => 'rssFetch.tmpl');
my $rss = XML::RSS->new();
my $data = get( 'http://del.icio.us/rss/mahler' ); # RSS Source
$rss->parse( $data );
 
$#{$rss->{'items'}} = 9; # Only the 10 most recent items
 
foreach my $item ( @{ $rss->{'items'} } ) {
  push @links, +{ description => $item->{'dc'}->{'subject'},
		  url => $item->{'link'},
		  title => $item->{'title'}
  }
};
 
$tmpl->param( links => @links );
open (FILEWRITE, ">$file");
print FILEWRITE $tmpl->output();
close FILEWRITE;
 
exit();

With the included modules you can do a lot of other interesting stuff. The XML::RSS module also includes functionality to create feeds and you could quite easily create aggregated feeds and other cool stuff with Perl and RSS-feeds.