Remember Vitacilina? A small aggregation library I wrote last year to be intended to replace Planet on Planeta Linux? Well, it never quite replaced it but it achieved some level of stability since I was using it for a number of tasks at work. So, during this long holiday weekend, I received a notification that the Request To Package bug I had filled against the Work-Needing and Prospective Packages in Debian has already been taken care of and the library had been uploaded. Of course, I could have made this myself a long time ago, but at the time it was simpler and faster just to hope someone else would do it at some point.

So, Dario did it. He packaged it and uploaded version 0.1 under the umbrella of the Debian Perl Group. Hurray!

But then I realized that Alexandr Ciornii had implemented some nice changes to Vitacilina back in September that I never got to include or release as a CPAN distribution. And so I just did. I've uploaded 0.2 to CPAN and you can fetch it with cpanf Vitacilina or wait for the Debian Perl folks to update it

Vitacilina, ¡ah, qué buena medicina!

A few months ago. Maybe more than a year, I started hacking on Vitacilina, which was meant to be the replacement for Planet on all countries Planeta Linux supports. I was doing well, I even hosted the code back then in Google Code. Later, I forgot about it, but I'd always been wanting to replace Planet with some homebrew solution for the Planeta Linux community. Anyway, that hasn't happened yet. However, I did start using Vitacilina for my own needs on a local sandbox for my employer and it used to work pretty well. I've been hacking it to fit very specific requirements, though.

Anyway, I thought it was a good moment to release it publicly, just because it was all hidden there. So, I didn't implement the changes I did for my employer (because they were very specific for our products) but I did clean it up and wrote some documentation.

Now, what exactly is Vitacilina? Well, it's a feed aggregator. It's written in Perl (it's a Perl module) and it uses YAML to get its list of feeds and names and Template Toolkit to format and dump the output, it was efficient for me because it was very easy for me to create dumps:

use Vitacilina;

my $v = Vitacilina->new(
  config => "config.yml",
  template => "template.tt",
  output => "output.html",
);
$v->render;

And that's it. I used to create YAML files on the fly to create new Vitacilina objects and render them according to some data.

The  config file would look something like this:

http://myserver.com/myfeed:
  name: Some Cool Feed

http://feeds.feedburner.com/InfinitePigTheorem:

  name: David Moreno

And the template file:

 [% FOREACH p IN data %]
  <a href="[% p.permalink %]">[% p.title %]</a>
   by <a href="[% p.channelUrl %]">[% p.author %]</a>

 [% END %]

In that way, it's very simple, quick and easy to do aggregations. I just love TT, why wouldn't I?

So go grab Vitacilina at CPAN. Also, the Git repo is at github.com/damog/vitacilina.

However… I started to hack on a similar more ambitious project called rFeed, that it's more of a framework than a simple library, which is why I stopped further Vitacilina development. I'll talk about rFeed later when the time comes.

En el último par de semanas, y gracias principalmente al interés de la gente y de David Valdez que se puso las pilas, hemos crecido en la familia de instancias en Planeta Linux, pues se han unido a nuestra familia las instancias de Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua y Panamá. Muchas gracias a cada uno de los interesados que mandaron los feeds y nombres acusando a los blogueros linuxeros centroamericanos para regocijo de los lectores. Ya somos once las instancias en Planeta Linux:

• Planeta Linux Chile
• Planeta Linux Colombia
• Planeta Linux Costa Rica
• Planeta Linux Ecuador
• Planeta Linux El Salvador
• Planeta Linux España
• Planeta Linux México
• Planeta Linux Nicaragua
• Planeta Linux Panamá
• Planeta Linux Perú
• Planeta Linux Venezuela

Muchas cosas se han prometido alrededor de Planeta Linux y hemos ido caminando muy lentamente, pero nuevas cosas quiero que se implementen:

• Un nuevo diseño.
• Instancias más integradas unas con las otras.
• Una instancia global agrupando a los casi 500 inscritos activos.
• Empezar a usar Vitacilina, reemplazando a Planet.
• RT para manejar las peticiones.

Gracias a todos, tanto a los que escriben, los que leen, los que administran, los que apoyan.