Too good to be news is a realtime poetry generator based on news feeds and verses. The app grabs current headlines from The New York Times and National Public Radio RSS feeds. In addition, I made a file that has a collection of verses written by Charles Simic, a Serbian-American poet and Pulitzer-Prize laureate. The source structures look like this:
1) New York Times
2) Charles Simic
3) National Public Radio
4) Charles Simic
In order to parse the data, I employed a Python library called BeautifulSoup (thank you Adam!)
Steps
1) Grab the data from the previously mentioned URLs.
i.e
2) Define a list for each service (NYT, NPR, Simic)
3) Locate the tag to be parsed.
4) Declare None in case of empty results.
5) Append the headlines to the list.
6) Randomly shuffle the list.
7) Pick one sentence and print the result.
8) Apply the same procedure to every source of information.
9) Test the Python code in terminal.
10) Build an app and deploy it to a server. If everything works well, work on the aesthetic side and styles.
11) Test everything and run it on the server. Then, record a video and upload it to Vimeo.
