Essential Blogging

Running Blagg

Blagg may be run in either interactive or automatic mode, aggregating only feeds of the same mode in your rss.dat file. When run in interactive mode, Blagg ignores all feeds marked as automatic and vice versa.

Interactive Blagging

To run Blagg interactively on the Mac OS X or Unix command line, type:

./blagg -mode=interactive

Under Windows, type:

perl blagg -mode=interactive

Blagg starts up, fetches each feed in turn, and asks whether you’d like to blog each story in turn. Type y for yes, n for no, or q to quit, and press the Enter key.

Figure 9-8 shows Blagg aggregating the BoingBoing feed interactively.

Figure 9-8. Interactive Blagging

Figure 9-9 shows the annotated ETCON item alongside the previous two weblog entries. Notice Blagg automatically adds a parenthesized (link), linking to the original weblog entry on BoingBoing and bracketed [bOing bOing], linking to the source of the entry, the BoingBoing weblog itself.

Figure 9-9. Interactively aggregated story

Automatic Blagging

To run Blagg automatically on the Mac OS X or Unix command line, type:

./blagg -mode=automatic

Under Windows, type:

blagg -mode=automatic

Blagg starts up, fetches each feed in turn, and quietly adds new stories it finds to your weblog.

Figure 9-10 shows a new story on Andy Oram appearing just after the annotated ...