README.md

Google Alerts -> Static Site convertor

This is a small project to aggregate news feeds (via Google Alerts) for my personal use at neal.news.

Environment

neal.news is hosted on AWS. A rough outline is:

1. Email recieved by SES, stored to S3
2. Lambda function fetches email, extracts content, applys template, pushes HTML back to S3, and queues a scoring job.
3. S3 serves static site.

Manually firing a lambda job from AWS UI

• Go to create test event
• Fill in the messageId below - it is the only field actually used, the other mail headers will be pulled from the file with that ID on S3

{
  "Records": [
    {
      "eventSource": "aws:ses",
      "eventVersion": "1.0",
      "ses": {
        "mail": {
          "timestamp": "2020-07-30T14:20:54.877Z",
          "source": "3RdciXxQKAH4iqqingcngtvu-pqtgrn0iqqing.eqo@alerts.bounces.google.com",
          "messageId": "qlkjb610bfq4c4nlm99u2plkh9li82uo4iu2s401",
          "destination": [
            "[email protected]"
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Item Ranking / Scoring

1. Clicked items are logged back to CloudWatch events (via an API Gateway).

2. Those historical clicks are used to train a classifier

   1. Currently using BERT + xgboost
   2. Retrained on a SageMaker GPU spot instance every Monday.

3. That model is used to re-rank incoming news.

   1. Read/write index.html from S3.
   2. 10% of items are scored randomly to help mitigate overfitting.