NewsDiffs

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

Original installation at newsdiffs.org. A product of the Knight Mozilla MIT news hackathon in June 2012. Authors: Eric Price (ecprice@mit.edu), Greg Price (gnprice@gmail.com), and Jennifer 8. Lee (jenny@jennifer8lee.com)

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

Requirements

You need to have installed on your local machine

Git
Python 2.6 or later
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 and then $ pip install Django

Initial setup

$ 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/

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

on a Mac, you will want something like

$ pip install beautifulsoup4 $ pip install beautifulsoup $ pip install 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

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 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 is cumulative).

To run the scraper every hour, run something like:

$ 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

  which will output the text that NewsDiffs would store.

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

This should cause the scraper to start tracking the site.