Stapler

Stapler, a web site to news feed tool for Radio UserLand

Download Stapler 2.2.6 (06 February 2003, zip)

Stapler is an RSS extractor tool for Radio UserLand: it creates syndication feeds from web sites and other content. These feeds can be used with Radio UserLand's News Aggregator or other XML syndication software. General scripts for extracting feeds with CSS-like selectors and regular expressions are included as well as several special purpose scripts, and Stapler is expandable with your own scripts written in Radio's UserTalk language. Stapler features a full tool website for browser-based configuration and documentation. Stapler is published under a BSD license.

You may also be interested in eVectors RssDistiller.

Stapler 2.2.6 is for Radio UserLand 8. Stapler 1.2.0 is still available for Radio UserLand 7.

Installing Stapler

1. Unzip Stapler.root to your Radio Tools directory.

2. Open Radio's Tools page. If Stapler is disabled, enable it.

Upgrading Stapler

NOTE: If you have a version of Stapler before 1.7.3 or 1.7.4, upgrade to 1.7.4 before upgrading to 2.2.6, or remove Stapler and install afresh.

1. Close Radio.

2. Unzip Stapler.root from the archive over the one in your Radio Tools directory.

3. Start Radio.

If you have trouble with the install, find a bug, or have any other comments or questions, email me at stapler@markpasc.org with your problem.

Using Stapler

Open the Stapler web site with the Tools->Stapler->"View in browser" menu option (or by going to http://127.0.0.1:5335/Stapler/ in your browser). Click the Help option for instructions on using Stapler.

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Version history

2.2.6, 6 February 2003: Radio News Errors scanner added; it makes a feed listing your subscriptions that were not successfully aggregated when Radio last did a news scan. Bug in blogHeadlines when using description length limit fixed; new "description mode" available in blogHeadlines, for easily selecting whether to use no description, the whole description, an excerpt of a given length, the first sentence, or the first paragraph.

2.2.5, 31 January 2003: "RSS" scanner added; this is good for making an aggregate feed from several other existing RSS feeds. Stapler should no longer try to scan when you've enabled "Work Offline."

2.2.4, 12 January 2003: Fixed error in counting of new items. Added Dave Winer's codeFreshener code, by way of Andy Fragen's installCodeFreshener tool.

2.2.3, 6 January 2003: Fixed stupid error in the Radio comments scanner; it should actually work now.

2.2.2, 11 October 2002: Added RSS 1.0 format. Apostrophes in scanner and format data fields are no longer incorrectly encoded to "'". Checkbox options are correctly updated when unchecked.

2.2.1, 12 August 2002: Feed descriptions are correctly written to disk. Feeds with no items no longer cause Stapler to write badly formed XML. Added radioComments scanner to provide a feed informing you of new comments to your Radio weblog. The blogHeadlines scanner ignores titles of "Untitled," abbreviating the item content instead. The beforeAndAfter scanner has an "Include Before and After strings" option. Scanner options shown in textareas are now properly escaped. Using the "Subscribe" button only writes the feed to disk if the file didn't already exist. Added StaplerSuite.tools.newItem (feed) script for use by scanner authors.

2.2.6, 6 February 2003: Radio News Errors scanner added; it makes a feed listing your subscriptions that were not successfully aggregated when Radio last did a news scan. Bug in blogHeadlines when using description length limit fixed; new "description mode" available in blogHeadlines, for easily selecting whether to use no description, the whole description, an excerpt of a given length, the first sentence, or the first paragraph.

2.2.5, 31 January 2003: "RSS" scanner added; this is good for making an aggregate feed from several other existing RSS feeds. Stapler should no longer try to scan when you've enabled "Work Offline."

2.2.4, 12 January 2003: Fixed error in counting of new items. Added Dave Winer's codeFreshener code, by way of Andy Fragen's installCodeFreshener tool.

2.2.3, 6 January 2003: Fixed stupid error in the Radio comments scanner; it should actually work now.

2.2.2, 11 October 2002: Added RSS 1.0 format. Apostrophes in scanner and format data fields are no longer incorrectly encoded to "'". Checkbox options are correctly updated when unchecked.

2.2.1, 12 August 2002: Feed descriptions are correctly written to disk. Feeds with no items no longer cause Stapler to write badly formed XML. Added radioComments scanner to provide a feed informing you of new comments to your Radio weblog. The blogHeadlines scanner ignores titles of "Untitled," abbreviating the item content instead. The beforeAndAfter scanner has an "Include Before and After strings" option. Scanner options shown in textareas are now properly escaped. Using the "Subscribe" button only writes the feed to disk if the file didn't already exist. Added StaplerSuite.tools.newItem (feed) script for use by scanner authors.

2.2.0, 23 July 2002: Feeds can be exported to and imported from XML files. The beforeAndAfter scanner, which makes items from whatever is between specified strings, is available. Regex scanner now uses patterns of backreferences (eg \1: \2) instead of groups for item data. Stapler provides an option to disable upstreaming in its publishing directory. Scanners' scanner-specific data can be presented in textareas, not just text fields.

2.1.0, 12 July 2002: Weather Underground scanner is fixed. The selector scanner can be called by other scanners without passing a feed. Pages in Stapler's HTTP cache more than a week old, such as those for feeds with date variables in their URLs, are deleted. The HTTP user-agent string Stapler users is settable in preferences.

2.0.3, 23 May 2002: Recursion problems attempting to upgrading the data file are fixed. Whether it's time to scan is calculated more safely with respect to bad input data.

2.0.1, 23 May 2002: The "Subscribe" button didn't work. Stapler would only automatically upgrade its data table before a scan; now it also does so when viewing Stapler's web page.

2.0.0, 21 May 2002: Stapler no longer uses the concept of sources that are grouped into feeds; there are only feeds, some of which aggregate the items of other feeds. This is a big internal change.

1.7.4, 5 May 2002: The blogHeadlines scraper honors posts' titles, if present. The "upgradeData" script is run automatically during the hourly scan if it needs running. Problem conditions discovered by the upgradeData script were displayed in dialog boxes that were sometimes too small for their messages; these errors are now written to the Radio Events Log, with appropriate dialog box. Interim release before Stapler 2.0, if all goes according to plan.

1.7.3, 2 February 2002: fixed syntactical bug in "Republish feeds" script and HTML stripping bug in blogHeadlines scraper.

1.7.2, 1 February 2002: Directories to which to publish files are automatically created ("staplerFeeds" error); publish buttons and menu option work all the time; item links are made non-relative when scraped; blogHeadlines scraper ignores items with unchecked "Home Page" categories; new HTML document type and siteChanged scraper.

1.7.1, 22 January 2002: "Upgrade data" bug in which Stapler would incorrectly try to upgrade data from versions 1.1.0 and later directly to 1.7.0; #subtemplate.txt was being written out incorrectly, resulting in a totally unusable tool website.

1.7.0, 21 January 2002: After several prereleases, the first version of Stapler for Radio 8. Support for Radio 8's status center, filesystem-based tool website, and tool info on the tools page; subscribe to feeds within Stapler; OCS 0.4 document type and scraper for producing an OCS feed of your Stapler feeds; compact lists on main sources and feeds pages; more self-contained install.

1.2.0, 29 September 2001: Feeds can be published in RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, or any document formats you add; feeds have "View Feed" pages; Weather Underground scraper; feed "never scanned" bug fixed; more control options for scraping sources.

1.1.3, 30 June 2001: Feeds no longer have "by Stapler" appended to their titles; items without descriptions are correctly published; conversion of URLs from relative to absolute fixed; blogHeadlines scraper for making a headline feed for one's MUOTD weblog included; help pages include blogHeadlines and the options added to the regex scraper in 1.1.2.

1.1.2, 14 June 2001: A feed is published if its file is missing, even if there are no new items; regex scraper now works.

1.1.1, 13 June 2001: Fixed scraper-related bugs in the StaplerData upgrade routine.

1.1.0, 12 June 2001: Regular expressions scraper; View Source page; redesigned, non-table-based Web interface; see StaplerSuite.TODO outline in database for complete list.

1.0.3, 19 May 2001: Fixed hard-coded addresses. Removed my sources (hee-hee).

1.0.2, 19 May 2001: In the ByNumbers scraper, fixed incorrect conversion from relative to absolute URLs. Fixed when a source would not be added to the feed when its Use <link/> option was enabled and its feed had no template set, in StaplerSuite.scrape.

1.0.1, 18 May 2001: Fixed incorrect ignoring/converting of a source's hours property in StaplerSuite.scrape.