WedelNewsBot

Fetches news from https://www.wedel.de/ (official website of a town in the north of Germany) and posts them to Twitter.

Live Bot

The bot is currently live and tweeting at: https://twitter.com/WedelNews

Third party modules and changes

Warning: The twitter module has been changed to support 280 characters per tweet. I grew tired of waiting for an official update and changed it myself. If the official module has been changed by now, there shouldn't be any issues.

• twitter: https://github.com/bear/python-twitter/
  • pip install python-twitter not just twitter, that's a different module!
• bs4: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/beautifulsoup4
• sklearn: http://scikit-learn.org/
• nltk: http://nltk.org/
  • You have to download the stopwords package: import nltk and nltk.download("stopwords")

Feature / ToDo List

• Place configuration variables outside the code and deploy on GitHub :)
• Use 280 character tweets.
• Use "#ANZEIGE" hashtag in the beginning of tweets for paid advertisements.
• Use machine learning to automatically classify articles and add hashtags accordingly.
• Add robustness against tinyurl errors (e.g. service unavailable).
• Use a database for storing the news instead of a JSON file.
• Remove old news that are no longer on the website to save space and speed things up.
• Optimize machine learning tag suggestions.