fmscore and Mail::Freshmeat

The good guys over at freshmeat.net changed the newsletter format yet again, breaking my software. I don't have the time or motivation to maintain it any longer, so it's currently useless. Sorry about that. If anyone wants to take over maintenance, let me know.

Introduction

You may or may not know that you can request to receive daily e-mail newsletters from that excellent site freshmeat.net which keep you bang up-to-date with Linux software releases. This saves you from checking the website regularly, which is a slower way of keeping track, not to mention expensive for those who pay for their internet connections. The only problem is, there are so many software releases every day, stuff you're interested in gets buried beneath the rest. Here's a solution ...

fmscore

fmscore is a Perl program which uses Mail::Freshmeat and a configuration file supplied by the user to rank the entries in a newsletter by interest. It also has the nice side effect of removing the advertising from the top of the newsletter.

See it in action!

If you're curious about what the results look like, here's a sample newsletter before and after filtering.

How do I install it?

It acts as a filter, and so can be used from your .procmailrc:

:0 :
* ^(From|To:|Cc:).*freshmeat\.net
| fmscore >> inboxes/freshmeat

Installation is very simple:

Download all the bits in one go from below, or hunt around this page and CPAN gathering them up individually.
Install Mail::Freshmeat. See below for more details specifically about this module. Install instructions for it are included in the tarball.
Put the fmscore program wherever you want.
Copy the sample configuration file to ~/.fmscorerc and edit it to suit your software tastes.
Set up a procmail filter similar to the one above.

Mail::Freshmeat

... is the Perl 5 module which parses the newsletter. It's available from CPAN, but the latest version is available separately from fmscore here. If you're curious about its internals, here's the source, and here's the man page, courtesy of pod2html.

Please note that this module requires Perl 5.005, Mail::Internet, and Mail::Header 1.15 or later, which are all available from CPAN.

Download

Here you can download all the different bits of fmscore and Mail::Freshmeat in one tar.gz file. The change log is included in this tarball.

Feedback

As with all my software, all suggestions / bug reports / patches (unified or context diff only please) are very welcome; please contact me by e-mail.