# Track The News
`trackthenews` is the script that powers [@FOIAfeed](https://twitter.com/foiafeed), a Twitter bot that monitors news outlets for reporting that incorporates public records laws like the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and tweets links to and excerpts from matching articles. The underlying software can track any collection of RSS feeds for any keywords.
If you want to run your own instance of `trackthenews`, you can download and install the package, and run its built-in configuration process. It can be installed with `pip`:
Python 3.6 is recommend but if you run [into troubles](https://github.com/thisisparker/track-the-news/issues/1), try it with Python 2.7.
```bash
pip3 install trackthenews
```
or by cloning the GitHub repository and running `setup.py`:
```bash
python3 setup.py install
```
Once it is installed, you can create a configuration by running the following command in the appropriate directory:
```bash
trackthenews --config
```
By default, the script will place all configuration files in a new `ttnconfig` folder in your current working directory, but you can also designate a directory for it to use.
```bash
python3 trackthenews --config ~/foo/bar/path
```
That configuration process will create the necessary files and walk you through setting up a Twitter bot for matching stories. After it is configured, you'll need to use a text editor to add the `matchwords` and RSS feeds to their respective files.
Once you've got everything set up, you can run the program without the `--config` flag to check for matching articles.
```bash
trackthenews
```
If you designated a custom installation directory, or if you're running it from another directory (or a `cron` job, for example) you will need to designate the directory in which the configuration files are installed.
```bash
trackthenews ~/foo/bar/path
```
Settings, such as the background color for new posts, the font, and the user-agent, are all located in `config.yaml`, in the designated configuration directory.
## How it works
Most of the script is dedicated to the `Article` class.
* `Article`s are created based on inputs. Currently those inputs are RSS feeds, which are stored in `rssfeeds.json`, but in future versions other inputs will include direct URLs, news APIs, Twitter feeds, or scraped pages.
* A series of `Article` methods then scrape and isolate the contents of each article (currently that cleanup is done with a [Python port of Readability](https://github.com/buriy/python-readability), but future versions may incorporate some per-site parsing), check whether it's suitable for posting, and then prepare images for tweeting.
* Finally, the `Article` tweets itself.
All articles are recorded in a sqlite database.
### Advanced feature: blocklist
In some cases, you may wish to suppress articles from being posted, even though they would otherwise match. You can do so by writing a new function, `check`, and placing it in a file named `blocklist.py` in the configuration directory. `check` takes an Article (and so has access to its `outlet`, `title`, and `url`) and should return `true` for any article that should be skipped.
## License
MIT.