Newswall

This is my version of a Tumblelog. Why, you might ask? Because I can.

Installation and usage

1. Add newswall to INSTALLED_APPS

2. Run ./manage.py migrate newswall (or syncdb, if you prefer to work without South)

3. Add the following line to your urls.py:

   url(r'^news/', include('newswall.urls')),
   

4. Add news providers by create a few Source objects through Django's admin panel

5. Create a cronjob running ./manage.py update_newswall periodically (i.e. every hour)

Providers

newswall has a few bundled providers, those being:

Elephantblog

Adds news entries for every active entry in a elephantblog installation on the same website. No additional configuration required (or possible). Add the following JSON configuration to the Source entry:

{"provider": "newswall.providers.elephantblog"}

Facebook Graph Feed

This provider adds news entries for every wall post on a Facebook page. The wall posts are accessed through the Graph API; you'll need a copy of the Python Facebook SDK somewhere on your Python path. You'll need an access token with offline_access permission for this provider. Required configuration follows:

{"provider": "newswall.providers.fb_graph_feed",
"object": "FEINHEIT",      // used to construct the Graph request URL
"from_id": "239846135569", // used to filter stories created by the
                           // object referenced above, ignores stories
                           // sent by others
"access_token": "..."
}

We suggest to use App Access Tokens to query the Facebook Page feed, because they don't expire. To get an App Access Token, simply open this URL with your browser, after filling in the required fields (the all caps words):

https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?client_id=YOUR_APP_ID&client_secret=YOUR_APP_SECRET&grant_type=client_credentials

More infos according the App Access Tokens can be found on the official Facebook documentation: <https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/using-app-tokens/>

To obtain the "from_id" configuration parameter, you can query the Facebook Open Graph API Backend with your Browser:

https://graph.facebook.com/OBJECT

f.e.: <https://graph.facebook.com/FEINHEIT>

RSS Feed

The RSS feed provider can take any RSS or Atom feed (in fact anything parseable by feedparser and turn the stories into news entries:

{
"provider": "newswall.providers.feed",
"source": "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/unsocialrider.rss"
}

Twitter RSS Feed

Specialized RSS feed provider which does not write anything into the story body but only fills the story title. Title and content are always the same in Twitter's RSS feed anyway:

{
"provider": "newswall.providers.twitter",
"user": "feinheit"
}