Get Beautiful News

Each day Information Is Beautiful publishes an infographic of a piece of good news (think Hans Rosling). The RSS feed is at:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/beautifulnewsdaily

This project parses the RSS feed and downloads a local copy of each graphic. I wrote this primarily to populate a daily dashboard I'm writing, but the script as delivered is meant to be run daily and will display each newly-downloaded image (to a maximum of a week's worth).

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running. It assumes a Unix-like system, like MacOS.

Prerequisites

A working recentish version of ruby, and, optionally, a shell-level open command - on my Mac, this opens the Preview.app on the recently downloaded files. Edit the line DISPLAY_PROGRAM in the script beautiful-news to change it for your system.

Installing

Decide where you want the files to reside, and change to that directory. Then:

$ sudo gem install nokogiri
$ git clone
$ ln -s beautiful-news/beautiful-news ~/bin/beautiful-news
$ beautiful-news

Images are saved to the beautiful-news/images directory.

Built With

• ruby
• emacs

Authors

• Randy Fischer

Acknowledgments

• Hat tip to Kevin Kelly for pointing me to Beautiful News.

License

This project uses the Nietzsche license: everything is allowed.