AC (in development)

AC connotes delivery of electricity, but in this case is short for article-to-campus.

How it works

You provide a URL to a news article on news.ucsc.edu, and AC

1. Fetches the HTML from the URL
2. Sanitizes the HTML (remove unnecessary tags and attributes, make links fully-qualified)
3. Pulls author and audience information out of the HTML
4. Modifies the HTML (removes images, sharing links, and author information)
5. Compiles a new template for the email and inserts the HTML
6. Inlines a new CSS stylesheet so the message works with email clients like Gmail
7. Uses the URL slug (filename on the website) to save the file in ./build/

Requirements

• Node and NPM installed
• Command line experience

Setup

1. Clone this repo
2. cd into the project directory
3. Run npm install

Use

Run the following command to fetch a page:

node app.js [URL-to-fetch]

Example:

node app.js https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/07/frank-honduras-book.html

Prepares and saves the HTML content in ./build/frank-honduras-book.html

Roadmap

• Modularize the individual parts of the script.
• Make this into a full app that can send email too.
• Remove the requirement that the file be saved before inlining.

References

• Using Google Groups to send campus broadcasts (UCCSC, 2013).