[Pan-users] RSS [was Re: New PAN]

[Toby A Inkster]

Duncan wrote:

> This one's almost certainly very "bluesky".  FWIW, I've read about scripts
> that can take a group (as fetched by say leafnode) and turn it into a
> feed, and I think that's a neat idea, but it doesn't so well fit the way I
> work, so I didn't followup with further investigation.

One thing that I did think about was writing a patch to embed a Python
interpreter into PAN such that you could subscribe to newsgroups called

        PYTHON.foo.bar.baz

And it would load up a Python object called "foo" to retrieve a list of
article headers, and for each article clicked on, request the body from
foo. "bar", "baz" and so forth would be additional parameters passed to the
module.

This would give PAN a fairly flexible extension mechanism that could be
adapted for not just RSS and Atom but also, say, screen-scraping of
particular websites that don't provide a feed, or system log files, mail
spools -- potentially anything you might want to subscribe too (but
probably without any posting option!)

-- 
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/CSS/Javascript/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!