Blog aggregation, static-website style!

This is a plugin for the Pelican static site generator.

It allows generating a page aggregating blog articles from other web sites.

Usage

Install this plugin:

$ pip install git+https://framagit.org/bochecha/pelican-planet#egg=pelican_planet

Then, in your Pelican config file, enable the plugin:

PLUGINS = [
    ...
    'pelican_planet',
    ...
    ]

Next, declare the feeds you want to aggregate in your Pelican config file:

PLANET_FEEDS = {
    'Some amazing blog': 'https://example1.org/feeds/blog.atom.xml',
    'Another great blog': 'http://example2.org/feeds/blog.atom.xml',
    }

Write a Jinja2 template for your aggregation page. For example, if the rest of your website is generated from Markdown pages, then create a planet.md.tmpl file with the following contents:

Some blogs aggregated here.

{% for article in articles %}
# {{ article.title }}

{% endfor %}

Finally, declare the template and destination page in your Pelican config file:

PLANET_TEMPLATE = 'planet.md.tmpl'
PLANET_PAGE = 'content/planet.md'

Then rebuild your website as usual using the pelican command line, and you should have your blog aggregation page.

You'll probably want to rebuild your website periodically though, maybe with a systemd timer or a cron job, to always fetch the latest articles in the feeds you aggregate.

Template design

The template for your aggregation page will be passed an articles variable, containing the list of articles aggregated.

Each item of this list will have the following attributes:

• title: The title of the article;
• updated: The date at which the article was last updated, as a timezone-aware datetime object;
• author: The author of the article;
• link: The URL to the article on its original website;
• summary: The summary text of the article;
• feed_name: The name of the feed from which the article originated, as defined in the Pelican config file;

Optional configuration

You can have more control on the generated page, by setting a few more options in your Pelican config file:

• PLANET_MAX_ARTICLES: The maximum number of articles to show on the page.

  By default, 20 articles from all feeds will be added to the page.

• PLANET_MAX_ARTICLES_PER_FEED: The maximum of articles from a single feed ending on the page.

  By default all articles of a given feed are considered.

• PLANET_MAX_SUMMARY_LENGTH: The maximum number of words kept from the summary.

  By default the summary of the article will be the full text coming from the feed.

• PLANET_MAX_AGE_IN_DAYS: The maximum age of an article to be included in the page.

  By default only articles no older than 180 days are added.

Legalities

pelican-planet is offered under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License, either version 3 or any later version.

We will never ask you to sign a copyright assignment or any other kind of silly and tedious legal document before accepting your contributions.

In case you're wondering, we do not consider that a website built with pelican-planet would need to be licensed under the AGPL.