AnchorBot

A (prototype of a) simple learning news feed aggregator that works surprisingly well.

Note: I plan to redo this piece of software very soon.

Why?

While journalism is regarded as the fourth column the western society is standing on, the introduction of web 2.0 caused a disruption in the journalistic ecosystem. News are all over the place. Blogs, newspapers and broadcasting services mingle together in one web of relevant and irrelevant articles with a wide range of quality.

Reading news can be very frustrating today:

• Centristic shareholders influence framing and relevance decisions
• Social networks resonate echo chambers
• Style variety, ads and click-bait poison your attention

Anchorbot delivers. It additively merges several newsrooms into an automated personal one. It presents the news in a way that is easy to the senses and helps you to concentrate on the important things, not the loudest. You decide upon the relevance of headlines.

Features

• Subscribe to RSS and ATOM feeds
• Scrape full text and embedded media from articles (similar to Instapaper and Readability)
• Highlight selected keyword, the first and last sentence in paragraphs
• Bot and interface run on local machine. No trust on cloud services required.

Missing features

• User friendly UI for managing feeds and keywords and stopping the program
• Display article author
• Android app
• reactive web interface

Setup

Requirements

• an installed Python 2
• a running Redis service
• probably Linux (nothing else tested)

Install

Run the following as root:

pip2 install justext Pillow redis_collections flask flask-markdown
git clone https://github.com/pschwede/AnchorBot.git
cd AnchorBot

This command assumes that pip2 is pip for Python 2. From here continue with Usage.

Usage

1. Run the bot

./bot.py

2. Add subscriptions

Add urls to ~/.config/anchorbot/config.

3. Start reading

./start.sh & firefox 0.0.0.0:8000

4. Stop

Currently not implemented! Try to kill all the anchorbot jobs:

pkill -f bot.py
pkill -f web.py
pkill -f start.sh