Recording Your 15 Minutes of Fame

I don’t know about anyone else, but Google News has become an important source of news in my daily surfing. Even more useful has been the Google News Alerts , 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 , we use News Alerts to keep up on our exposure in the press, and record the mentions in our press blog . 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 Python Script to create SimpleBlog entries.

You can find the source to GNAimport.py, along with the code for the SimpleBlog Python script, here . 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.