Plagger FAQ
Here's frequently asked questions and solutions for them.
General
Does Plagger require Gmail account?
Nope, absolutely not. Using Gmail is just one of the "best practices" of Plagger usage. Gmail provides you a relatively fast, searchable and scalable view of massive HTML emails with over 2.5G storage. That makes Gmail the "offically recommended" frontend of feed updates view.
However, you can use your own Mail clients with Gmail.pm like Thunderbird, Becky! or Mail.app and they work just fine. And actually, there's also a couple of Publish plugins to enable reading feed updates via cellphones (CHTML.pm), 2ch browsers (2chdat.pm), Acrobat Reader (PDF.pm) etc. Some of them are not useful enough yet, but with upcoming Plagger server API feature, there could be lots of useful frontend more than just Gmail.
Is Gmail plugin only valid for Gmail account?
No, Publish::Gmail plugin is actually a generic HTML Email plugin, which supports SMTP, SMTP-TLS and sendmail as a transport protocol. You could just send the updates to Yahoo! Mail, MSN Hotmail or private mail account and browse them via whatever MUA supports HTML emails with UTF-8 character, like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird.
Installation & Setup
What's the easiest way to install on Windows?
Install Plagger and its dependencies using charsbar's PPM repository and install 'assets' directory from SVN repository. Then you're all set. See InstallPlagger for more.
Is config file needed to be named 'config.yaml'?
No, you can pass any config filename as a command line option '-c' or '--config'.
plagger -c foobar.yaml
Where is the "assets" directory?
Question: I installed Plagger via CPAN and I'm not sure which directory I should use for "assets_path" config. Where's that?
Answer: Unfortunately, Makefile.PL of Plagger is not complete on installing assets to a specific shared directory of the system. For now, you have to use svn client software to checkout Plagger source code, where you can find the up-to-date "assets" directory. See InstallPlagger for more.
Troubleshooting
DateTime? error in templates
Plagger::Plugin::Publish::Gmail [fatal] undef error - Cannot compare a datetime to a regular scalar at /usr/local/lib/perl/5.8.7/DateTime.pm line 1435
This could be fixed with updating Template::Provider::Encoding to the latest version, and install Template-Toolkit with XS Stash option.
Do you want to build the XS Stash module? [y] Do you want to use the XS Stash for all Templates? [y]
If you're building Plagger on a platform without C compiler, you need to apply a patch for Template::Stash by yourself to avoid this bug.
Bloglines UTF-8 error
Subscription::Bloglines sometimes gives you an error saying:
:232: parser error : Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !
...
^
:232: error: Bytes: 0xEF 0xBC 0x3C 0x2F
...
^
at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/WebService/Bloglines/Entries.pm line 17
This is a known Bloglines bug and I added a workaround in WebService?::Bloglines 0.10. Check the versin of WebService?::Bloglines and update to the newest, which addresses this issue. You might also need to install XML::Liberal module from CPAN.
Gmail SMTP error
When you subscribe to hundreds of feeds and send all of them to Gmail account using Gmail's SMTP TLS, you might encounter a following SMTP error:
Data failed: 550 5.4.5 Daily sending quota exceeded. v50smxxxxxxxxx at lib/Plagger/Plugin/Publish/Gmail.pm line 123
This one is a known limitation with Gmail's SMTP capability. You'd better use your own SMTP server or that of ISP's, whatever is not a Gmail's one.
Feeds with "application/xml" Content-Type are not aggregated
Question: Some feeds with Content-Type: application/xml looks like not aggregated, saying
Plagger [error] http://example.com/rss.xml is not aggregated by any aggregator
Answer: Update your Feed::Find to the latest CPAN version. That'll fix the problem.
Build from svn gives me an error in Makefile.PL
Question: When I try to install from SVN, perl Makefile.PL gives me
Bareword "use_test_base" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at ./Makefile.PL line 87.
Answer: install YAML, Module::Install and Test::Base before you run Makefile.PL. When you do this with CPAN Plagger package, you don't have to, since they're all in inc/.
Howtos
How can I notify email per entry, not per feed?
Obviously you can patch Publish::Gmail to send email per entry, not per feed. Actually we plan to have a global setup (or something common to plugin) that configures how plugins get the updates, eg. per entry? per feed? per everything including all the feeds? which is transparent to both plugin developers and Plagger users.
Alternatively, you can use Filter::BreakEntriesToFeeds? plugin, which does the exact thing you'd want.
How can I use HTTP proxy when Plagger fetches RSS feeds
Set HTTP_PROXY environment variable and Plagger UserAgent? will honor that.
How can I access authorized Feeds?
Use http://username:password@hostname/ as an URL (i.e. include username and password for the Basic Authentication) and you can authenticate Plagger user-agent.
