An RSS feed for Romenesko's Left Rail of links and notes. RSS .91 feed.

Romenesko Left Rail RSS Feed

"""
Quickly hacked script to turn Romenesko's left rail into an RSS feed. Dates don't really work.
By Derek Willis
dwillis@gmail.com

This script is in the public domain.
Dependencies: Beautiful Soup (< 3.0.7)
"""

import urllib
import datetime
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

url = "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45"
html = urllib.urlopen(url).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)

rss="""<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<rss version="0.91">
	<channel>
		<title>Romenesko Left Rail</title>
		<link>http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45</link>
		<description>The other stuff</description>
		<language>en-us</language>
"""


left_rail = soup.findAll('td', width='24%')[0]

items = left_rail.findAll('p')[1:]

for item in items:
    if item.a["href"] == '/column.asp?id=45&aid=62012':
        break
    else:
        url = item.a["href"]
        try:
            title = item.a.b.contents[0]
        except:
            title = item.span.contents[0]
        rss+="\n<item>\n<date>%s</date><title>%s</title><link>%s</link>\n</item>\n" % (datetime.date.today(),title,url)

#close rss feed                
rss+="""
	</channel>
</rss>
"""

fh=open('left_rail.rss','w')
fh.write(rss) 
fh.close()