Simple Ruby Snarl RSS alerter

zuwiki (Mike Zink) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 23:02:17 GMT

This simple Ruby program will send a Snarl alert when a new post is added to a feed. Assumes your Snarl command line tool is named "snarl.exe" and in your PATH.



require 'rss/1.0'

require 'rss/2.0'

require 'open-uri'



def snarl(title, msg)

  # This part actually sends the notification.

  # Change "snarl" to your snarl command line tool if you have problems

  system "snarl /M \"#{title}\" \"#{msg}\""

end



source = ARGV[0]

content = ''

open(source) { |s| content = s.read }

rss = RSS::Parser.parse(content, false)

puts rss.channel.title

puts rss.channel.link

puts rss.channel.description



last_item = nil



while true

  puts "Checking for updates..."

  open(source) { |s| content = s.read }

  rss = RSS::Parser.parse(content, false)

  if last_item == rss.items[0]

    sleep 5*60*1000

  else

    last_item = rss.items[0]

    snarl last_item.title + " (#{rss.channel.title})", last_item.description.gsub(/<\/?[^>]*>/, "")

    sleep 10*60*1000

  end

end

DZone Snippets: Zuwiki's Code Snippets

Simple Ruby Snarl RSS alerter