Announcing DirectRSS. For when you want as little as possible between you and your RSS.

It’s an open-source MetaWeblog API implementation that modifies RSS 2.0 files in place. It also supports the Blogger and b2 APIs. No database required.

With it, you can use a weblog editing client such as NetNewsWire or w.bloggar to update an RSS feed, then use XSLT or the companion HTML renderer to generate a web site.

To handle larger collections of posts, it supports Dave Winer’s blogBrowser format, which, instead of a single file, uses one RSS file per month and one folder per year. To the weblog client, it looks like one big file, with all posts editable. A file containing the few most recent postings is generated automatically, for the benefit of news aggregators.

It was originally written as an XML experiment, but it’s proven reliable. It’s packaged as a Python CGI script, and comes with its own pre-configured Python web server for running locally. If you already have Python installed, there’s no setup required to run the working tutorial. (If you don’t, it only takes a few minutes to install Python.) It’s compatible with the bundled Python in Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and other Pythons lacking an expat parser. (It falls back on xmllib.)

New features in this version include full support for namespaces in both the RSS file and the MetaWeblog API, post modification dates, and a tutorial showing how to render the posts into HTML.

Currently, it’s packaged with ShearerSite, the (awkwardly-named) web interface that also performs the rendering into HTML. I may split out just the RSS editing portion if there’s interest. The HTML renderer can display RSS 2.0 files or blogBrowser archives filtered by category, date range, or numeric range.

See the download page (hosted by SourceForge), tutorial, and revision history.