README.md

##Description Simple Dashing widget (and associated job) to display RSS feeds. Based on Iaian Mitchell's News widget.

##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 'net/http'
require 'uri'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'htmlentities'

news_feeds = {
  "seattle-times" => "http://seattletimes.com/rss/home.xml",
}

Decoder = HTMLEntities.new

class News
  def initialize(widget_id, feed)
    @widget_id = widget_id
    # pick apart feed into domain and path
    uri = URI.parse(feed)
    @path = uri.path
    @http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host)
  end

  def widget_id()
    @widget_id
  end

  def latest_headlines()
    response = @http.request(Net::HTTP::Get.new(@path))
    doc = Nokogiri::XML(response.body)
    news_headlines = [];
    doc.xpath('//channel/item').each do |news_item|
      title = clean_html( news_item.xpath('title').text )
      summary = clean_html( news_item.xpath('description').text )
      news_headlines.push({ title: title, description: summary })
    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:  #47bbb3;
$value-color:       #fff;
 
$title-color:       rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7);;
$moreinfo-color:    rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.8);;
 
// ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Widget-weather styles
// ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
.widget-news {

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

  .headline-container {
    display: none;
  }

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

  .heading{
    color: black;
  }

}

this has trouble reading a lot of websites.

Dear Todd,

thanks a lot for this great widget. I know, it is pritty unusual: How would one load an RSS-feed, that requires username and password? I tried
news_feeds = {
"feed" => "https://username:pass@url.to.feed/feed.xml",
}
That works pretty well in firefox but in this context, it doesn't. The feed is provided by a joomla site, that contains internal information for our organization....

Best regards

Luke

Why does the data-id in the dashboard snippet not match the data being sent by the job?