Autoposter for Wikinews

Around the Facebook community a lot of people have investigated the ability to autopost messages into group. The aim is, that a script is posting a lot of URLspam into a certain group. Most users who are using such tools are convinced that this is the best practice method in generating traffic and it is hard to convince them that what they are doing is wrong.

To get an idea why autoposting into Facebook groups is a dead end, we should explain the more elaborate way for content aggregation. I call this principle an autoposter for wikinews. The advantage is that at first, the underlying technology is available for free because it is a simple python script, and the second feature is, that not Facebook but a quality first social network is adressed, namely Wikinews.

import feedparser
url="blog.xml"
feed = feedparser.parse( url )
items = feed["items"]
for item in items:
  title = item[ "title" ]
  url = item[ "link" ]
  print "=",title, "="
  print url+"\n"

it has to be executed with the “python bot.py > out.md” command. It will generate a textfile in the mediawiki syntax and is using as input the RSS stream from a blog. The resulting Wikinews website is shown in the screenshot.

Even if the python script is not very complicated, it make sense to go through the details. In the screenshot the preview of the wikinews article is shown. The sourcecode for the article was generated by the wikinews autoposter. As input the autoposter was using the RSS feed of my blog. It extracted the headlines and the URL and converts it into the mediawiki syntax. The result is, that my blog is converted into the wikinews of the next day. It is rendered into the HTML syntax by the mediawiki engine.

The most interesting feature is, that the links are clickable. If a reader reads the news, he can click on the URL and is redirected to my blog on which the original content is stored.