Writer Watcher

Project Description

Writer Watcher is a tool I created to solve the inconvenience of manually tracking when my favorite writers post new articles. It extracts blog links from your Gmail email (draft), monitors these blogs using RSS feeds, and sends you email notifications whenever new content is published.

Features

• Feed Monitoring: Tracks feeds for new articles from your favorite writers.
• Email Notifications: Sends an email notification with details of the new articles.
• Automatic Blog Management: Fetches new blogs from Gmail and updates the list of monitored blogs.

Requirements

• Python 3+
• Gmail account with OAuth 2.0 credentials
• RSS feed links of your favorite writers
• Gmail email ID
• Gmail email containing new blog links. example:

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/TolulopeJoel/writer-watcher.git
   cd writer-watcher

2. Create a virtual environment and activate it:

   python3 -m venv venv
   source venv/bin/activate

3. Install the required packages:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Set up environment variables:

   • Create a .env file in the root directory of the project.
   • Add the following environment variables:

     EMAIL_DRAFT_ID=your_email_id_containg_links
     EMAIL_TO=your_email@example.com
     EMAIL_FROM=seeus@seahorse.com
     

5. Add Gmail API credentials:

   • Obtain OAuth 2.0 client credentials from the Google Cloud Console.
   • Save the credentials.json file in the root directory of the project.

6. Create an initial blogs.json file:

   []

Usage

1. Run the application:

• Access via web:

  To run the application and access it through a web browser, use the following command:

  python main.py

• Access on terminal:

  To run the application and interact with it directly in the terminal, use the following command:

  python blog.py

2. Access the application:

• Via web browser:

  After running python main.py, open your web browser and go to the following URL:

  http://localhost:5000/new
  

• Via terminal:

  After running python blog.py, you can see the list of articles directly in the terminal.

In both cases, the application will list new articles and send an email notification.

Nice to Haves

• Sort posts by published date
• Direct RSS Feed Links: Allow users to directly add RSS feed links in the email draft for accurate
  data fetching, especially for blogs that do not follow the standard /feed path.
• Separate 'new' writers posts from the main email body. When you add a new blog link to your draft,
  the application can't tell which posts from that blog you've read, so it sends all posts from the
  newly added blog. Separate these so you can easily distinguish newly added blog links from
  updates on blogs you already read.

Author

• Tolu Joel

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.