I’ve put a new version of Hep up for testing (see the bottom of the page). This is an alpha release, meant for developers and curious people. It has some nice new features:
- Uses Mark Pilgrim’s rssfinder module to find the RSS feed for a web page, searching syndic8’s database if the page itself doesn’t contain a link to the feed. This means that Hep should be able to find the RSS feed for almost any site that has one.
- Also uses Mark’s rssparser module to parse RSS feeds, which works around some buggy feeds and eliminates the problems some people were having with Python’s XML libraries.
- Lets you set up message destinations, and has an SMTP server that accepts mail sent to those destinations. Now you can send e-mail to your weblog (through the Blogger or MetaWeblog APIs), or your advogato diary, or both at once.
- Lets you view your Inbox on a web page, so you can read and delete messages without using your mail client if you want.
A complete changelog is here.
But before you download, let me remind you that there are reasons that this is an alpha release:
- The SMTP server has NO SECURITY, and only works for the first Hep user you create. Don’t run it on a shared or public system unless you want the whole world to be able to post to your weblog.
- The SMTP server hasn’t been thoroughly tested and might occasionally lose an outgoing mail message. A suggestion: put yourself on the bcc list for any important messages that you send. That way you can verify that your message got through.
- The first time you run the new version you’ll probably get a lot of messages you’ve already seen (the way it generates message IDs is a little different, so all RSS messages look new).
These things will all be fixed soon enough, so if you’re just using Hep as an RSS aggregator and you’re happy with the way it’s working I recommend you wait to upgrade, at least until this release gets into the beta stage.
If you’re an existing user and you want to upgrade, here’s what you need to know to get started fast. Edit the hep.ini file that comes with the distribution (don’t replace it with your old one – there’s some new stuff in there related to the SMTP server, and it won’t work without it). Set the SMTP upstream_server=your.smtp.server. Set your mail client to use localhost, port 5337 for outgoing mail. Send mail to [destination_name]@hep. And when you set up your destinations don’t put spaces or special characters in your destination name.
If you’re interested in seeing an almost complete list of things that need to be done before 0.3 is ready, check out the TODO file in the distribution.