FeedzirraRedis
20 Jul 2011
If you’ve ever wanted to include some data from an RSS/Atom feed on a page from Ruby, you’ve probably run into this problem:
It’s completely unreasonable to hammer the feed provider with a request every time the page is rendered, but it’s no more reasonable to use a big relational database like MySQL just to cache some stupid tweets or blog posts, especially if your application wouldn’t otherwise need one.
But apparently this layer of persistance has been deemed out-of-scope by the creators of popular RSS consumer libraries such as Feedzirra.
So I wrote a little gem called feedzirra-redis to take care of this as transparently as possible. You can use it just like you would Feedzirra normally, but your feeds and entries do not disappear at the end of the script, so you can do the dirty work from a Rakefile via cron instead of in the web request/response cycle while your users impatiently twiddle their thumbs.
Installation
$ gem install feedzirra-redisSee the README and test suite for example usage.
Enjoy!