BBC News Widget for Dashing

README.md

##Description Simple Dashing widget (and associated job) to display BBC News Stories.

##Dependencies nokogiri

Add it to dashing's gemfile:

gem 'nokogiri'

and run bundle install.

##Usage To use this widget, copy news.html, news.coffee, and news.scss into the /widgets/news directory. Put the news.rb file in your /jobs folder.

To include the widget in a dashboard, add the following snippet to the dashboard layout file:

<li data-row="1" data-col="1" data-sizex="1" data-sizey="1">
  <div data-id="news" data-view="News"></div>
</li>

news.coffee

class Dashing.News extends Dashing.Widget

  ready: ->
    @currentIndex = 0
    @headlineElem = $(@node).find('.headline-container')
    @nextComment()
    @startCarousel()

  onData: (data) ->
    @currentIndex = 0

  startCarousel: ->
    setInterval(@nextComment, 8000)

  nextComment: =>
    headlines = @get('headlines')
    if headlines
      @headlineElem.fadeOut =>
        @currentIndex = (@currentIndex + 1) % headlines.length
        @set 'current_headline', headlines[@currentIndex]
        @headlineElem.fadeIn()

news.html

<div class="heading">
  <image src="http://static.bbci.co.uk/frameworks/barlesque/2.35.2/orb/4/img/bbc-blocks-dark.png"></image>
<span> News</span>
</div>
<div class="headline-container">
  <h1 data-bind='current_headline.title' class="title"></h1>
	<div class="headline">
		<div>
			<p class="description" data-bind='current_headline.description'></p>
		</div>
	</div>
</div>

news.rb

class BbcNews
  def initialize()
  	@http = Net::HTTP.new('feeds.bbci.co.uk')
	end

	def latest_headlines()
  		response = @http.request(Net::HTTP::Get.new("/news/rss.xml"))
  		doc = Nokogiri::XML(response.body)
  		news_headlines = [];
  		doc.xpath('//channel/item').each do |news_item|
  			news_headline = NewsHeadlineBuilder.BuildFrom(news_item)
  			news_headlines.push(news_headline)
  		end
  		news_headlines
	end
end

class NewsHeadlineBuilder
	def self.BuildFrom(news_item)
		{
			title: news_item.xpath('title').text, 
			description: news_item.xpath('description').text, 
		}
  end
end

@BBC_News = BbcNews.new()

SCHEDULER.every '15m', :first_in => 0 do |job|
  headlines = @BBC_News.latest_headlines
 	send_event('news', { :headlines => headlines})
end

news.scss

// ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Sass declarations
// ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
$background-color:  #47bbb3;
$value-color:       #fff;
 
$title-color:       rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7);;
$moreinfo-color:    rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7);;
 
// ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Widget-weather styles
// ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
.widget-news {

  background-color: $background-color;
  vertical-align: baseline !important;

  .headline-container {
    display: none;
  }

  .heading span {
    color: black;
  }

  .heading img {
    margin-top: -5px;
  }

  .description {
    font-size: 0.8em;
  }

  .heading{
    font-size: 1.2em;
    padding: 20px;
  }

}

I'm trying to get this working with Google News... all good except for the text that is returned by "//channel/item" is pretty messy.

Thoughts?

I'm receiving the following error when trying to run this on CentOS (though it worked fine on Ubuntu) with Ruby version 1.9.3-p327:

news.rb:3:in `initialize': uninitialized constant BbcNews::Net (NameError)

@willjohnson it's because news.rb is missing require 'nokogiri' at the top. That will fix it :)

Also require 'net/http' is missing on top.

bundler: failed to load command: thin (/usr/local/bin/thin)
LoadError: cannot load such file -- nokogiri

I'm trying to convert this over to work TechCrunch's RSS feed with mixed success. Their feed includes image links in the descriptions. How can we filter these out?