Google News aggregates news from all over the world and lets you
filter by useful constraints, such as keywords and dates. In fact, Google News can even
eliminate duplicate stories (a result of news syndication companies such as the Associated
Press and United Press International selling stories to dozens or hundreds of
newspapers).
You can use Google News to track news topics easily and quickly. One way is to find
news manually via the web interface at http://news.google.com/. Another approach is to
use the Google News Really Simple Syndication (RSS) interface. Used in conjunction with
a programming language such as Ruby, this interface allows you to manage news aggregation
in ways limited only by the boundaries of your imagination.
In this chapter, you??™ll create a graphical report from Google News RSS data. To parse
the data for this example, you??™ll use a handy utility called FeedTools, which we??™ll look at
first. To create the graphs, you??™ll use a plug-in called CSS Graphs Helper. This is an easyto-
use tool for creating simple HTML charts, as you??™ll see when you create the Rails
application later in the chapter.
Pages:
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308