Introducing Gopherfeed

Today I made the first release of a new free software project of mine called Gopherfeed. This is a very simple little Python library, with accompanying command line program, which translates RSS and Atom feeds into Gophermap files. All the heavy lifting is done by the infamous feedparser. Gopherfeed can be used to convert individual feed URLs into gophermaps (where each entry in the gophermap is just a URL link to the webpage of an entry in the feed), or it can be fed a file of URLs and build a nice directory structure for exploring the feeds. Each feed gets its own directory with corresponding gophermap pointing to the feed entries, and the root directory has a gophermap pointing to each of the feeds, using the feed title as the selector description. If you run one of these batch conversions from an hour cron job, it essentially lets you use a gopher client as a bare bones feed reader. It's also a very quick and easy way to partially convert your existing website into a Gopherhole - just stick your blog and Twitter URLs into a file and you have a nicely presented gopher interface into stuff you've written. Certainly not a complete "gopherisation", but a nice way to get started with minimal effort.

The source code for Gopherfeed is on Github, which I've just recently started using. I may write about the decision to do that in the future. There are source zips/tarballs on PyPi, too.