The Scoop

The Scoop makes catching up on news you've missed easy. Choose a category and a time frame, and The Scoop will find the most popular news articles. The Scoop also provides summarisations of those articles, as well as a link to the full story.

Prerequisites

• OTS (Open Text Summarizer) command line tool:
  • http://libots.sourceforge.net/
  • ots.php must be able to call this
  • This requires libxml2 and glib2
• Apache2
• PHP 5.3.3+
  • This is what we have developed on so it is most likely to work
  • php_curl must be installed for our APIs
• MySQL 5.1
  • Again what it has been developed on so is most likely to work
• crond (cron jobs)
• Python 2.7.5
  • python-MySQL also required

Setup

1. Install prerequisites as above
2. clone the directory with git clone http://github.com/edlongman/thescoop.git
3. Set your server/alias directory to thescoop/site
4. Create a cron job of */5 * * * * python /path/to/thescoop/rss_log.py this logs the values every 5 minutes
5. Create a database in MySQL and import bbc.sql
6. Copy config.sample.py and config.sample.php and change the options to your sql info and remove the sample