I recently discovered feedparser.py, a library written by Mark Pilgrim that is amazing if you want to use python to consume rss feeds. It ‘normalizes’ the different versions of rss/atom out there into one request that you can use consistently. Doesn’t matter if it’s atom 0.1 or 0.3
A few links that are interesting together with feedparser.py as they show it’s usage:
- feedparser.org main page, which gives some examples
- Using feedparser.py to query twitter and putting those tweets on your website
- how to store rss content in a database using feedparser.py
I’m constantly amazed about the quality python code that is out there and you can just find via a simple google query. It certainly makes me think that choosing Python over, say Perl, was a good decision.
As for using feedparser.py to put relevant tweets on your website, note that you can also use javascript to achieve the same thing; go here for some twitter.com goodies and an explanation on how to set this up.