it an NNTP gateway, outliner, mailserver or anything else. rawdog probably
only runs on Unix-like systems.
-rawdog reads articles from a number of feeds and writes out a single HTML file
-containing the latest articles it's seen. It uses the ETags and Last-Modified
-headers to avoid fetching a file that hasn't changed, and supports gzip
-compression to reduce bandwidth when it has. It is configured from a simple
-text file; the only state kept between invocations that can't be reconstructed
-from the feeds is the ordering of articles.
+rawdog requires Python 2.2 or later. rawdog itself doesn't need any
+additional modules to be installed, but it uses distutils for
+installation, so if you're on a Debian system you'll need to install the
+"python-dev" package first.
+
+rawdog reads articles from a number of feeds and writes out a single
+HTML file, based on a template either provided by the user or generated
+by rawdog, containing the latest articles it's seen. It uses the ETags
+and Last-Modified headers to avoid fetching a file that hasn't changed,
+and supports gzip compression to reduce bandwidth when it has. It is
+configured from a simple text file; the only state kept between
+invocations that can't be reconstructed from the feeds is the ordering
+of articles.
To install rawdog on your system, use distutils -- "python setup.py install".
This will install the library modules that rawdog needs, and will install the
elapsed since it was last updated. This is useful if you're trying to
debug your own feed.
+"--config FILE" (or "-c FILE"), where FILE is an absolute path or a path
+relative to your .rawdog directory: Read FILE as an additional config
+file; any options provided in FILE will override those set in the
+default config (with the exception of "feed", which is cumulative).
+This is useful if you want rawdog to write two different output files
+with different sets of options ("rawdog -u -w -c config2 -w" will first
+update and write with the default config, then read config2, then write
+again).
+
+"--show-template" (or "-t"): Print the template currently in use to
+stdout. This is useful as a starting point if you want to modify your
+own template: do "rawdog -t >~/.rawdog/mytemplate" with "template
+default" in your config file, and you'll get a copy of the default
+template to edit.
+
+There are also the following options which may only be supplied once
+(they're read before any of the actions are performed):
+
+"--help": Provide a brief summary of all the options rawdog supports,
+and exit.
+
+"--dir DIR" (or "-d DIR"), where DIR is a directory: Use DIR instead of
+the $HOME/.rawdog directory. This is useful if you want to have two or
+more completely different rawdog setups with different sets of feeds;
+just create a directory for each.
+
You will want to run "rawdog -uw" periodically to fetch data and write
the output file. The easiest way to do this is to add a crontab entry
that looks something like this: