README.md

##Description Simple Dashing widget (and associated job) to display RSS feeds. Based on toddq's News widget. Due to comments about the widget not working for many sites I updated the widget to use Ruby's RSS library. It works quite well now.

##Screenshot

##Dependencies nokogiri

htmlentities

Add it to dashing's gemfile:

gem 'nokogiri'
gem 'htmlentities'

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="seattle-times" data-view="News" data-title="Seattle Times" data-interval="30"></div>
</li>

At the top of the news.rb job file, add any rss feed urls you want fetched to the hash, and the widget id to send data to. In the dashboard layout file, the optional data-interval binding can be used to specify how frequently to rotate the news items.

news.coffee

class Dashing.News extends Dashing.Widget

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

  onData: (data) ->
    @currentIndex = 0

  startCarousel: ->
    interval = $(@node).attr('data-interval')
    interval = "30" if not interval
    setInterval(@nextComment, parseInt( interval ) * 1000)

  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" data-bind="title"></div>
<div class="headline-container">
  <h1 class="title" data-bind="current_headline.title | raw"></h1>
  <div class="headline description" data-bind="current_headline.description | raw"></div>
</div>

news.rb

require 'rss'
require 'open-uri'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'htmlentities'

news_feeds = {
  "bbc-tech" => "http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/technology/rss.xml",
  "mashable" => "http://feeds.feedburner.com/Mashable",
  "techcrunch" => "http://feeds.feedburner.com/TechCrunch/",
  "opm" => "http://www.opm.gov/rss/operatingstatus.atom",
}

Decoder = HTMLEntities.new

class News
  def initialize(widget_id, feed)
    @widget_id = widget_id
    @feed = feed
  end

  def widget_id()
    @widget_id
  end

  def truncate(string, length = 200)
    raise 'Truncate: Length should be greater than 3' unless length > 3

    truncated_string = string.to_s
    if truncated_string.length > length
      truncated_string = truncated_string[0...(length - 3)]
      truncated_string += '...'
    end
    truncated_string
  end

  def latest_headlines()
    news_headlines = []
    open(@feed) do |rss|
      feed = RSS::Parser.parse(rss)
      feed.items.each do |item|
        title = clean_html(item.title.to_s)
        begin
          summary =  truncate(clean_html(item.description))
        rescue
          doc = Nokogiri::HTML(item.summary.content)
          summary = truncate((doc.xpath("//text()").remove).to_s)
        end
        news_headlines.push({ title: title, description: summary })
      end
    end
    news_headlines
  end

  def clean_html( html )
    html = html.gsub(/<\/?[^>]*>/, "")
    html = Decoder.decode( html )
    return html
  end

end

@News = []
news_feeds.each do |widget_id, feed|
  begin
    @News.push(News.new(widget_id, feed))
  rescue Exception => e
    puts e.to_s
  end
end

SCHEDULER.every '60m', :first_in => 0 do |job|
  @News.each do |news|
    headlines = news.latest_headlines()
    send_event(news.widget_id, { :headlines => headlines })
  end
end

news.scss

// ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Sass declarations
// ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
$background-color:  #FF9500;
$value-color:       #fff;
 
$title-color:       rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7);;
$moreinfo-color:    rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.8);;
 
// ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Widget-news styles
// ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
.widget-news {

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

  .headline-container {
    display: none;
  }

  .title {
    font-size: 1.2em;
  }

  .description {
    font-size: 0.8em;
    color: $moreinfo-color;
  }

  .heading{
    color: black;
  }


}

I tried to use this widget but everytime i use it, my dashboard doesn't dispay the dashboard in the right way.
I only have this issue when i keep the news.coffee file...

It would be nice if this widget could just fetch the last X (to be defined in jobs/news.rb file) news and not all news. For example I am only interested in the last 3 most recent news in an RSS feed.

@MrBenzim
I'm also having problems with many RSS feeds, for instance the confess one mentioned on this page. Some work, like bbc-tech.

Hello, how is the data getting to the dashboard?
What is the meaning of:

add any rss feed urls you want fetched to the hash, and the widget id to send data to

I thought I just have to add the RSS links to the news.rb file, but it seems not enough. What do I have to do to get the news from my RSS feeds? Is this widget not getting itself the content?