Venus on windows
For Planet Essener I needed planet-software. Venus seemed to be easy to setup so I downloaded it. Somehow firefox produced a 0 byte zip file and also the tgz contained a 0 byte file inside. Wget-to-the-rescue solved it however.
Venus is written in Python and for windows you need to install the python-windows extensions. There is a very useful test script included in the Venus release that will tell you what you need to get extra filters and theme-engines running. This produced a series of errors and the more software I installed for the extensions the more errors occurred.
They looked like this:
======================================================================
ERROR: test_apply_filter (tests.test_apply.ApplyTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Documents and
Settings\steveno\workspace\venus\tests\test_apply.py",
line 100, in test_apply_filter
splice.apply(self.feeddata)
File "C:\Documents and
Settings\steveno\workspace\venus\planet\splice.py", lin
e 122, in apply
output = open(output_file).read()
TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, NoneType found
They all had a reference to a file in them. Since I had installed it in My Documents I figured that there was a problem with spaces in the path. (I realized this only after I sent a mail to the list). Installing it in c:\venus solved it. Later I got this mail from James Holderness who gave me a solution for the spaces:
I’ve had Venus running on Windows in a path with spaces. What I did was use
the 8.3 compatibility filenames everywhere in config.ini. For example, if
you need to refer to a path at \program files\venus you’d use path
/progra~1/venus. Also before running planet.py, I’d do “cd \progra~1\venus”
which ensured that my current directory was also space free. I think that
was all there was to it.
Once it is installed it is very easy to configure. I even managed to create a tag-filter so we can filter out personal posts from the various blogs 