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75 changes: 36 additions & 39 deletions README.md
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Expand Up @@ -3,13 +3,13 @@ NewsDiffs

A website and framework that tracks changes in online news articles over time.

Original installation at newsdiffs.org.
Original installation at <newsdiffs.org>.
A product of the Knight Mozilla MIT news hackathon in June 2012.
Authors: Eric Price ([email protected]), Greg Price ([email protected]),
and Jennifer 8. Lee ([email protected])

This is free software under the MIT/Expat license; see LICENSE.
The project's source code lives at http://github.com/ecprice/newsdiffs .
The project's source code lives at <http://github.com/ecprice/newsdiffs>.


Requirements
Expand All @@ -21,92 +21,89 @@ You need to have installed on your local machine
* Django and other Python libraries

On a Debian- or Ubuntu-based system, it may suffice (untested) to run
$ sudo apt-get install git-core python-django python-django-south python-simplejson

On Mac OS, the easiest way may be to install pip:
http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/installing.html
$ sudo apt-get install git-core python-django python-django-south python-simplejson

On Mac OS X, the easiest way may be to install pip:

http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/installing.html

and then
$ pip install Django

$ pip install Django

Initial setup
-------------

$ python website/manage.py syncdb && python website/manage.py migrate
$ mkdir articles

$ python website/manage.py syncdb && python website/manage.py migrate
$ mkdir articles

Running NewsDiffs Locally
-------------------------

Do the initial setup above. Then to start the webserver for testing:
$ python website/manage.py runserver

and visit http://localhost:8000/
$ python website/manage.py runserver

and visit http://localhost:8000/

Running the scraper
-------------------

Do the initial setup above. You will also need additional Python
libraries; on a Debian- or Ubuntu-based system, it may suffice
(untested) to run
$ sudo apt-get install python-bs4 python-beautifulsoup
(untested) to run:

on a Mac, you will want something like
$ sudo apt-get install python-bs4 python-beautifulsoup

$ pip install beautifulsoup4
$ pip install beautifulsoup
$ pip install html5lib
On a Mac, you will want something like:

$ pip install beautifulsoup4 beautifulsoup html5lib

Note that we need two versions of BeautifulSoup, both 3.2 and 4.0;
some websites are parsed correctly in only one version.

Then run
$ python website/manage.py scraper
Then run:

$ python website/manage.py scraper

This will populate the articles repository with a list of current news
articles. This is a snapshot at a single time, so the website will
not yet have any changes. To get changes, wait some time (say, 3
hours) and run 'python website/manage.py scraper' again. If any of
hours) and run `python website/manage.py scraper` again. If any of
the articles have changed in the intervening time, the website should
display the associated changes.

The scraper will log progress to /tmp/newsdiffs_logging (which is
overwritten each run) and errors to /tmp/newsdiffs/logging_errs (which
The scraper will log progress to `/tmp/newsdiffs_logging` (which is
overwritten each run) and errors to `/tmp/newsdiffs/logging_errs` (which
is cumulative).

To run the scraper every hour, run something like:

$ while true; do python website/manage.py scraper; sleep 60m; done
$ while true; do python website/manage.py scraper; sleep 60m; done

or make a cron job.

Adding new sites to the scraper
-------------------------------

The procedure for adding new sites to the scraper is outlined in
parsers/__init__.py . You need to

(1) Create a new parser module in parsers/ . This should be a
subclass of BaseParser (in parsers/baseparser.py). Model it off
the other parsers in that directory. You can test the parser
with by running, e.g.,

$ python parsers/test_parser.py bbc.BBCParser

which will output a list of URLs to track, and

$ python parsers/test_parser.py bbc.BBCParser http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21649494
[`parsers/__init__.py`](parsers/__init__.py). You need to:

which will output the text that NewsDiffs would store.
1. Create a new parser module in `parsers/`. This should be a
subclass of `BaseParser` (in `parsers/baseparser.py`). Model it off
the other parsers in that directory. You can test the parser with
by running, e.g., `python parsers/test_parser.py bbc.BBCParser`,
which will output a list of URLs to track, and
`python parsers/test_parser.py bbc.BBCParser http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21649494`,
which will output the text that NewsDiffs would store.

(2) Add the parser to 'parsers' in parsers/__init__.py
2. Add the parser to `parsers` in `parsers/__init__.py`

This should cause the scraper to start tracking the site.

To make the source display properly on the website, you will need
minor edits to two other files: website/frontend/models.py and
website/frontend/views.py (to define the display name and create a tab
minor edits to two other files: `website/frontend/models.py` and
`website/frontend/views.py` (to define the display name and create a tab
for the source, respectively). Search for 'bbc' to find the locations
to edit.