An RSS/ATOM aggregator is software which pulls together data from RSS/ATOM feeds, and mixes that data in a common presentation. RSS/ATOM is a pair of data formats used by web sites to list the available postings on the site. RSS/ATOM is used to help other sites know about new pages on the site, to quickly spread awareness of the new pages. For example a newspaper can easily inform subscribers to their RSS/ATOM feeds of the days news, or a blogger can easily inform their subscribers about the latest postings. An RSS/ATOM aggregator subscribes to several RSS or ATOM feeds, and as described mixes the items in the feeds into a common list.
I like the simplicity of the planetplanet software, but there are several things I do not like. I wanted to learn to use Groovy, and I wanted to write my own aggregator, and I thought the ROME project offered the perfect basis from which to write an RSS/ATOM aggregator. So here we are.
The result is a set of really simple scripts which together make a really flexible RSS/ATOM aggregation system.
The software described here is an open source (GPL) project