philgyford / daily-paper

For viewing a daily issue of the Guardian and Observer newspapers. `main` branch should be stable, current work is in `dev` branch.

Daily Paper

An interface for viewing a daily issue of the Guardian and Observer newspapers.
Using the Guardian Open Platform.
As used at Today's Guardian.

Introduction

This code consists of two main things:

• A Python script which fetches the day's newspaper content from the Open Platform and saves each article as a separate HTML file locally.
• An index.html file which uses JavaScript and CSS to display those HTML files.

The Python script should be run at least once per day, with the Guardian/Observer's daily content rolling over roughly around midnight, UK time. The list of content continues to change, so it's worth having the script run every hour or so for a while (but not all day, or you'll hit daily API limits). Running the script subsequent times in a day will update/replace any existing files.

Only one day's worth of content is saved at a time, with older days being deleted (the API only allows for you to keep content for 24 hours). Each day's content is stored in a dated directory within the archive/ directory.

Requirements

Uses Python 3.7.

Install the required modules using pipenv:

$ pipenv install

Or pip:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

The JavaScript requires jQuery (which is included).

Issues

There are various known issues/enhancements/proposals listed on the project's Issues page.

The site should work fine in most desktop web browsers, and not too bad on iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch. I've never used it on an Android device.

Installation

1. Get an API key for the Guardian Open Platform.

2. Install the python modules.

3. Make the daily-paper/public/ directory readable from the web. You can move it elsewhere without breaking the Python script, although I guess that will confuse Git. Or you could symlink it to somewhere appropriate.

4. Copy daily-paper/scripts/scraper-example.cfg to daily-paper/scripts/scraper.cfg.

5. Edit scraper.cfg and add:

   • Your API key.
   • The path to the directory where you want the dated folders for saved HTML files to be kept. This should be called archive and be within the project's public directory, at the same level as index.html.
   • If the verbose setting is left to 1, you will see a little debugging output when the script runs, including which articles have incomplete data.

6. Run the daily-paper/scripts/scraper.py script. This should leave you with a dated directory in the archive directory you specified in the config file. It should contain an HTML file for every article from today's paper.

7. View public/ in your web browser. You should be able to read today's paper. If you're not using an actual web server, you should be able to load the public/index.html file itself in your browser and still use the site.