Routers News

Routers is a collection of web-crawlers for various popular technology news sources.

It exposes a command-line interface to these crawlers, allowing for the distinguishing tech-news enthusiast to avoid leaving the comfort of their terminal.

It Currently Supports:

Technology News Sources

• Ars Technica
• Wired.com

Major Technology Blogs

• TechCrunch
• Mashable
• Gizmodo

Personal Technology Blogs

• Codes From The Underground, my blog

Mainstream News Sources

• New York Times
• USA Today
• L.A. Times

Other Random Stuff

• Github
• The Oatmeal
• xkcd

(this categorization is loose, please feel free to shuffle stuff around.)

It's Also An Experiment

It is my hope that, by open-sourcing a collection of news scrapers, a community can be built around building a powerful set of real-time news aggregation tools.

Installation

npm install routers-news -g

Usage

Listing News Sources

routers-news --sources

Outputs

Routers News Sources:

  news:
    major:
      NewYorkTimes: The New York Times Bits blog.
      LATimes: The business and culture of our digital lives, from the L.A. Times.
      USAToday: Power up with breaking news on personal technology, electronics, gaming and computers.
    tech:
      Wired.com: Wired magazine is a monthly US technology publication.
      ArsTechnica: Ars Technica is a technology news site catering to PC enthusiasts.
      TechCrunch: A network of technology-oriented blogs and other web properties.
  other:
    Github: Trending and featured repos on Github.com

Displaying Headlines

routers-news --source=github

Outputs

[1] MacLemon / CongressChecklist
  https://github.com/MacLemon/CongressChecklist

[2] dejan / rails_panel
  https://github.com/dejan/rails_panel

[3] feross / md5-password-cracker.js
  https://github.com/feross/md5-password-cracker.js

[4] shadowsocks / shadowsocks-go
  https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks-go

[5] bcoe / routers-news
  https://github.com/bcoe/routers-news

[6] andrew / 24pullrequests
  https://github.com/andrew/24pullrequests

[7] nkohari / jwalk
  https://github.com/nkohari/jwalk

[8] lockitron / selfstarter
  https://github.com/lockitron/selfstarter

[9] twitter / bower
  https://github.com/twitter/bower

[10]  Spaceman-Labs / SMPageControl
  https://github.com/Spaceman-Labs/SMPageControl

Loading Articles

routers-news --source=github --article=5

Outputs:

bcoe / routers-news:


A crawler for various popular tech news sources. Read technology news from the comfort of your CLI.
      — Read more
---------
https://github.com/bcoe/routers-news

The Crawlers

The news crawlers used by Routers come in two varieties:

• Page scrapers which use CSS selectors to extract content from news sources.
• RSS/Atom feed parsers, which crawl articles using an RSS or Atom news feed.

Examples of both can be found in the lib/sources directory.

Contributing

It's easy to add a new news source:

• fork the routers news repo.
• clone it locally.
• run npm install to install the libraries locally.
• create a new crawler in the lib/sources directory (everything in this hierarchy is automatically loaded).
• to test your crawler run: node ./bin/routers-news.js.

You can also help a ton by:

• reporting when crawlers are broken.
• extending on the crawelrs, I'd love to have:
  • Dates.
  • Authors.
  • Better image extraction.
• improving on the CLI client.

Help make our dreams of a collaborative web-crawler a reality :)

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2012 Benjamin Coe and Joshua Hull and Gabriel Silk. See LICENSE.txt for further details.