9.4 Using a shell script to fetch shimbun feeds

If you read lots of ‘shimbuns’, checking those for new articles can take some time due to emacs-w3m retrieving the feeds one by one. If you want to speed this up, you can use a shell script to retrieve the feeds, which you can either call manually (e.g. from within Emacs) or automatically through schedulers like cron. The feeds must be saved in specially named files, and emacs-w3m will then use those files instead of calling w3m.

The following variables control the local mode:

shimbun-use-local

Setting this to t will activate the local mode, meaning that emacs-w3m will first check if a feed is available as a local file. If it cannot be found, it will be retrieved through w3m as usual.

shimbun-local-path

This is the directory where the shimbun files are stored. The default value is w3m-default-save-directory.

The file name for a feed is expected to be the MD5 of the URL, truncated to the first 10 characters, appended with the string ‘_shimbun’. You can easily generate the file name for a feed in Emacs through

(concat (substring (md5 "http://example/feed") 0 10) "_shimbun")

If you use Gnus with ‘nnshimbun’, there is already a function which will generate a download shell script for all currently subscribed shimbun groups. Just call nnshimbun-generate-download-script, and it will generate the shell script in a new buffer which you can save afterwards. If you call the function with a prefix, it will put an ampersand after each w3m call, so that the feeds are retrieved in parallel.

This document was generated by TSUCHIYA Masatoshi on January 30, 2019 using texi2html 1.82.