/RSSTicker

Work project for a vertically-scrolling RSS feed ticker

Primary LanguageJavaScriptMIT LicenseMIT

RSSTicker

This is a project that I wrote to scroll a list of entries from an RSS feed, designed exclusively for use at my workplace.

I've just uploaded it here for the sake of ease of distribution for myself, and it may someday help someone figure out the same stuff I had to.

Usage

Install the environment using Pipenv, and then you can run this as you might run any other Flask app. This one is designed to be used in very low-traffic environments, so the below method of running it only uses the development server.

If you're in a higher-traffic environment or your ticker is available on the public internet, please use a real WSGI server like gunicorn instead.

  1. Create a file named .env in the cloned repo directory, and add the following text to it:

    FLASK_APP="ticker.app:app"
FEED_URL=Insert your feed URL here

TAG_DEFAULT=is-dark

  2. Install Pipenv dependencies and start the server:

    pipenv sync
pipenv run flask run

Configuration

This application is entirely configured using environment variables, and includes a simple way to colour the tag shown on each item in the ticker.

  • FLASK_APP - Required by flask_run, this should point to the Flask app.
  • FEED_URL - The URL (or path to local file) to the RSS/Atom feed to parse.
  • TAG_DEFAULT - The CSS class to apply to all non-matched tags by default.

Only a single tag is shown on each post. In order to change the colour of the tag, you can create an environment variable of the form TAG_TAGNAME, where TAGNAME is the name of your tag as given in the RSS feed. This should be entirely upper-case, and spaces may be replaced with underscores ( _ ). The value should be the CSS class to apply - As this project uses Bulma, the colours available are documented in the Bulma docs, here.

Tags are matched in the order they're found in the feed. The first tag to be matched to a configured CSS class (as explained above) is the tag that will be displayed on the entry. If no tags are matched, then the last tag found in the feed entry is used, with the TAG_DEFAULT colour specified above.

Customisation

If you have custom CSS to provide, simply create a file named custom.css in the static/css directory and it'll be included on the page as the last CSS file. This is preferred to modifying the CSS files that come with RSSTicker, as doing so could cause conflicts when you git pull to update.

If you'd like to customise this app further than it allows for, please feel free to create a fork and use it for your own purposes - as far as the license allows.