I don’t know about anyone else, but “Google News”:http://news.google.com has become an important source of news in my daily surfing. Even more useful has been the “Google News Alerts”:http://www.google.com/alerts?q=&hl=en, which allow you to receive email notifications of news stories containing specific keywords. Now an RSS or Atom feed of said stories would be even better, but News Alerts are a start.
At “Creative Commons”:http://creativecommons.org, we use News Alerts to keep up on our exposure in the press, and record the mentions in our “press blog”:http://creativecommons.org/press. Today I finished whipping up a little utility to make the job easier. GNAimport is a Python script which reads email messages from a specified mailbox (currently POP3), checks if they come from Google News Alerts, and then proceeds to parse the message in to a series of News Alerts. Each News Alert is then run through a series of handlers, which could do things like spit out an Atom feed or grab the contents of the URL. In the case of CC, the handler interfaces with a “Zope”:http://zope.org Python Script to create “SimpleBlog”:http://plone.org/newsitems/news_item.2004-05-30.2594378408 entries.
You can find the source to GNAimport.py, along with the code for the SimpleBlog Python script, “here”:http://yergler.net/projects/gnaimport. To use it you’ll need to set the mail server, username and password at the top. The list of handlers to use is specified in __main__.
Let me know if you find it useful or find bugs; enjoy.