Aggie the Aggregator

"Aggie the Aggregator" is an RSS aggregator written in Perl, using the MySQL database as a back-end data store. Aggie is the aggregator component of the WebSticky Project.

Aggie Facts

After much consideration of various licensing models, the current version of Aggie the Aggregator may be used under the following license:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
This means that you may not use Aggie the Aggregator for commercial purposes without my permission.
Aggie aims to comply as much as possible with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines of the Web Access Initiative and is being developed with accessibility and adaptibility in mind.
Aggie the Aggregator is presented in good faith but without warranty or implied fitness for purpose. Use Aggie the Aggregator at your own risk.
Aggie can handle well-formed RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0. The writer's preferred format is RSS 1.0, as this is RDF, which positively rocks. (Non English speakers: "positively rocks" means that the writer thinks that RDF is very, very good.) Aggie does not handle Atom feeds and will not pending a major re-write of the parser code.

Bug reports, feature requests to Matthew Smith: matt at kbc dot net dot a u

Recent Changes

All HTML elements are now stripped from feed item descriptions. I am sure that they should not be there in the first place.
Feeds served as Content-encoding: gzip can now be handled.
Auto-discovery code has been re-written from scratch and now parses the HTTP header rather than the document head.
All menus and lists of links are now represented as unordered lists rather than delimited paragraphs or divs.
Improvements to semantic markup - all lists of links and controls now have headings.

Known Issues / Annoyances / Work In Progress

Whilst most of the HTML entity encoding issues have been fixed, Aggie will not display characters properly from weird, non-standard character sets such as Windows 1252. Strictly speaking, these should not be in documents anyway and should be presented as HTML/XML entities in the first place. This issue means that a feed with this type of character encoding can case Aggie to fail an evaluation at http://validator.w3.org.
Read-only version of archived material will be included in the main programme.
Had to degrade to XHTML 1.0 Transitional to accommodate link targets for those who want links to open in new tabs or windows.
Jump-off pages to be prepared so that feed items can be viewed one at a time (one per page), with forward and backward controls. (These controls will be provided both as link rels and normal anchor links.)

Links and Files

Aggie Live Demo - note that refreshes of feeds can take a little while as Aggie has to make (and wait for) several calls to the Internet. Play to your hearts content, but please don't add any feeds that might offend other visitors. At present, the live demonstration is not the same that is available for download - I have made a few changes with more to come; the new version will only be packaged when I have done this.
Aggie Read-Only Version (old code)
Refresh error log - see how many broken feeds you can spot!
Basic CSS File - the stylesheet used to format Aggie. Use this, or bring your own! (provided that your browser supports user stylesheets)
As I am in the process of reviewing my version control systems for this project, please mail matt at kbc dot net dot a u if you would like a copy of the code.