Purpose
I'm a news junkie. I can admit that. I'm always looking for good news sources and better ways to read them. That's one reason why I like RdfSiteSummary? (RSS). However, what I don't really like is using the web browser as an RssAggregator. For me, email is the way to go. If I could just get all those news sites to send each article they write to me as an email message. No? Well, since they are already publishing their site summary as an RSS feed I decided to convert that to email. There were a couple of other projects to do the same thing; well, one. It was written in python and didn't work when I downloaded it. I looked at the code and could make easy sense out of what it was doing. So, I re-wrote it in Perl (since I don't really know Python).
I named it FetchRss.pl in honor of FetchMail?. My script also makes network connections and spools the information it finds through the local mail spool.
Posted by jshare at July 24, 2003 08:00 PM