I haven’t written here in a while, principally because I’ve been doing exams and finishing various projects at Uni. I’m now doing a summer studentships project for my department for which I get paid (excellent!), so that’s keeping me busy. However, I’m not really here to talk about all that stuff…

The purpose of this entry is to announce my personal Free Software project. Mu-Feeder (pronounced ‘mew-feeder’) is a project to replace the proprietary web service Twitterfeed with a piece of Free Software. Basically the idea is to take entries from an RSS or Atom feed and post them to a microblog. I figured this could be quite easily done and it would let me get used to the tools, etc involved in publishing Free Software. Basically, it’s not meant to be a complicated project, just to fill a gap and give me some experience.

At the moment the software is designed to run as a Python script executed via Cron. When it gets called it should build a summary of the top items in the feed (along with shortened URL’s) and post them to the configured microblog. I already have identi.ca support as well as (untested) twitter and StatusNet support, principally bacause they all use the same API. I’m aiming to have support for a single feed in the 0.1 release with support form multiple feeds in a subsequent release.

All the details are up on the Launchpad page at https://launchpad.net/mu-feeder and you can get the code via bzr with:

$ bzr branch lp:mu-feeder

Bug reports are welcome at https://bugs.launchpad.net/mu-feeder.

That’s about it, I’ll update on progress here as I go. Bye for now!

PS. Ironically this blog entry will be posted to identi.ca with the very service that Mu-Feeder aims to replace!