Suricate brings the meerkat open wire service into the realm of handheld devices, wireless email appliances, and interactive pagers. I wrote suricate to address the needs of people that have email provided on their hand held devices but no web access. suricate will push the wire service content to the user. I currently use it with my research in motion inter@ctive pager.

Meerkat is a web-based syndicated content provider that is based on RSS (Rich Site Summary format) which in turn is based upon XML (eXtended Markup Language). Meerkat defines channels that provide distinctive categories of news - such as apache, linux, xml, zope et al. The news for these channels is constantly updated by the backend. An API is provided to access these channels.

To get suricate up and running, set up the .suricaterc file defining the channels that you are interested in, and the mail address for the handheld device or interactive pager. Fire up crontab and add suricate to it along with the frequency at which you need your fix. Kick back and grab a cup of joe, while suricate goes to work and brings the power of meerkat to you !!!

Suricate is written in perl, requires XML::Parser, Mail::Sendmail and libWWW modules, and is copylefted under a GPL license. The name suricate is derived from suricatta-which is the genus of a meerkat. suricate currently provides meerkat content for the following global channels/profiles: