[[!meta  title="Atomgen"]]
[[!meta  date="2009-03-28 05:48:23"]]

I've been using [Atom feeds][] to publish announcements to my course
websites recently.  The ‘please check this page daily for changes’
directives I saw on a few other pages were too painful to bear ;).
I've written a little PHP script to convert the atom.xml into XHTML so
non-atom students can still read the announcements online, and I've
been using [rss2email][] in a cron job and a [procmail][] rule to
automatically email the class any new announcements I post in the
feed.  It works rather well I think, even if noone ends up actually
looking at the feed ;).

Anyhow, I wrote up a little command line wrapper ([[atomgen.py]])
around [lxml][]

    atomgen -o atom.xml new --title 'Physics 201' --author 'W. Trevor King' \
      http://www.physics.drexel.edu/~wking/phys201
    echo "Changes to the Phys201 website will be noted in this feed." | \
      atomgen -o atom.xml add -i atom.xml 'Feed purpose' \
      http://www.physics.drexel.edu/~wking/phys201

[Atom feeds]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28standard%29
[rss2email]: http://rss2email.infogami.com/
[procmail]: http://www.procmail.org/
[lxml]: http://codespeak.net/lxml/

[[!tag tags/blogging]]
[[!tag tags/programming]]
[[!tag tags/python]]