trackthenews 0.1.8.5

Monitor RSS feeds for keywords and act on matching results. A special project of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Copyright (c) 2018 Parker Higgins, Freedom of the Press Foundation

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

Description: Track The News
==============

``trackthenews`` is the script that powers
[@FOIAfeed](https://twitter.com/foiafeed), a Twitter bot that monitors
news outlets for reporting that incorporates public records laws like
the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and tweets links to and excerpts
from matching articles. The underlying software can track any collection
of RSS feeds for any keywords.

If you want to run your own instance of ``trackthenews``, you can
download and install the package, and run its built-in configuration
process. It can be installed with ``pip``:

.. code:: bash

pip3 install trackthenews

or by cloning the GitHub repository and running ``setup.py``:

.. code:: bash

python3 setup.py install

Once it is installed, you can create a configuration by running the
following command in the appropriate directory:

.. code:: bash

trackthenews --config

By default, the script will place all configuration files in a new
``ttnconfig`` folder in your current working directory, but you can also
designate a directory for it to use.

.. code:: bash

python3 trackthenews --config ~/foo/bar/path

That configuration process will create the necessary files and walk you
through setting up a Twitter bot for matching stories. After it is
configured, you'll need to use a text editor to add the ``matchwords``
and RSS feeds to their respective files.

Once you've got everything set up, you can run the program without the
``--config`` flag to check for matching articles. If you designated a
custom installation directory, or if you're running it from another
directory (or a ``cron`` job, for example) you will need to designate
the directory in which the configuration files are installed.

Settings, such as the background color for new posts, the font, and the
user-agent, are all located in ``config.yaml``, in the designated
configuration directory.

How it works
------------

Most of the script is dedicated to the ``Article`` class. \*
``Article``\ s are created based on inputs. Currently those inputs are
RSS feeds, which are stored in ``rssfeeds.json``, but in future versions
other inputs will include direct URLs, news APIs, Twitter feeds, or
scraped pages. \* A series of ``Article`` methods then scrape and
isolate the contents of each article (currently that cleanup is done
with a `Python port of
Readability <https://github.com/buriy/python-readability>`__, but future
versions may incorporate some per-site parsing), check whether it's
suitable for posting, and then prepare images for tweeting. \* Finally,
the ``Article`` tweets itself.

All articles are recorded in a sqlite database.

Advanced feature: blocklist
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In some cases, you may wish to suppress articles from being posted, even
though they would otherwise match. You can do so by writing a new
function, ``check``, and placing it in a file named ``blocklist.py`` in
the configuration directory. ``check`` takes an Article (and so has
access to its ``outlet``, ``title``, and ``url``) and should return
``true`` for any article that should be skipped.

Platform: UNKNOWN
Classifier: License :: OSI Approved :: MIT License
Classifier: Programming Language :: Python
Classifier: Programming Language :: Python :: 3
Classifier: Programming Language :: Python :: 3.6