FirstClass to Mail and RSS

The Ringo MUG in Tokyo is exploring alternatives to the increasingly expensive FirstClass BBS system. I wrote a simple script that scrapes new messages off the FirstClass web interface and converts them to Email. I mail the messages to a set of Mailman mailing lists for distribution to members. Recent versions of the script can also build RSS feeds of the individual conferences and the overall conference activity.

2005-02-07

• RSS 2.0 format feed
• keep more old messages around in pickle, so a separate (CGI) program has the option of making longer RSS feed
• pull the charset from the meta tag in the page header
• obscure Email addresses in RSS synopses
• additional HTML entity to plain text decoding
• handle mailto: links specially for plain text (don't show both text and link if they are the same except for the 'mailto:'

2003-10-07

Hide quotes that start with up to three initials and > when building RSS synopsis. Quote ' in RSS titles.

2003-10-03

Improve RSS synopsis quotation removal. Use time zone offset instead of name in pubddates.

2003-09-08

Improve plain-text "bold" markup.

2003-09-07

Switch to FC Server 7.x HTML format. Build RSS feeds for each list. Improve message header parsing.

2003-05-29

Make each Email message multi-part-alternative with both HTML and plain-text parts. (Last public release for FC 6 servers.)

2003-05-01

Attach a list of live links to attachments on FC web interface.