RSS aggregators and user-agent information for Blagg

• 03 February 2003
• aggregators,
• blosxom,
• etag,
• rss-tag,
• wget

Tool reuse a la Unix philosophy, and more on building out the future in tiny steps.

Prompted by a post on the re-awakened WriteTheWeb, I made a small mod to Blagg so that more detailed information is sent in the User-Agent header – announcing that the RSS aggregator ‘blagg’ is the agent requesting the RSS feed.

Following its sibling Blosxom‘s philosophy of simplicity and reuse of existing tools, Blagg uses ‘wget’ (or ‘curl’) to make the HTTP call. Adding the appropriate option to the string in $get_prog, e.g. by changing from this:

my $get_prog = 'wget --quiet -O -';

to this:

my $get_prog = 'wget -U 'blagg/0+4i (wget)' --quiet -O -';

was all that it took.

(In fact, personally I’m using my ETag-aware version of wget so I made the change in that small script, wget.pl rather than in Blagg itself.)

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