Simple automation of TDBNews [ENG 🇬🇧]

Przejdź do polskiej wersji tego wpisu / Go to polish version of this post

For several weeks now, I have been publishing a series of Sunday posts called #TDBNews, in which I share interesting things I came across during the week. Manually collecting these, in my opinion, interesting articles would be a very tedious and highly inefficient task that I would have to repeat weekly, dedicating part of my Sunday time to it, which I could spend on other activities. That’s why I decided to automate it in a very simple way. The operating principle is trivial, and for clarity, I will present it in bullet points.

1. Every day, I browse through my RSS sources (using the Reeder application), my timeline on Mastodon, and Reddit, which are my three main windows to the world of information.
2. When I come across an article that seems interesting, I save it to the Read Later list, which I usually revisit in the evening.
3. Then, I share these truly interesting things on my Mastodon profile with a special hashtag #TDBNews.
4. A PHP script monitoring the RSS feed of my Mastodon profile picks up these toots and saves them to a text file.
5. At the end of the week (on Sunday), I run a second script that creates a ready-to-use post code from the collected toots, following the notation used by WordPress. In practice, it consists of a static introduction and conclusion, which are the same in every TDBNews post, and a variable part in the middle where I embed the collected toots as iframe frames.
6. All that’s left is to give the post a title, which simply involves providing the current date, and publish it.

Examples of such posts can be seen by going here. And in this post, I’ll show you behind the scenes how these scripts, which I use to implement this simple automation, look like.

Script collecting my toots tagged with #TDBNews

As usual, I’ll explain its operation through comments placed inside the code. Here, familiarity with the content of the post in which I showed how I made a bot for publishing news from popular portals on Mastodon may also come in handy.

<?php header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); // URL TO MY MASTODON PROFILE $url = "https://mastodon.tomaszdunia.pl/@to3k.rss"; // FILE WITH ALREADY FOUND TOOTS $file_all = file_get_contents("tdbnews_all.txt"); // LOAD A XML FILE (RSS FEED) $feeds = simplexml_load_file($url); // SETTING TIME ZONE date_default_timezone_set("Europe/Warsaw"); // DATE OF MONDAY THIS WEEK TO FILTER EVERYTHING BEFORE THAT DATE $monday = strtotime("Monday this week"); $monday = date("Y-m-d", $monday); // IF FEED IS NOT EMPTY if(!empty($feeds)) { // SPLIT FEED INTO SEPARATE ITEMS (TOOTS) foreach ($feeds->channel->item as $item) { // CONVERT LINK TO A STRING VARIABLE (WITHOUT THAT STR_CONTAINS GIVES ERROR) $link = strval($item->link); // GET PUBLISHING DATE AND CHANGE IT'S FORMAT TO YYYY-MM-DD $pubDate = $item->pubDate; $pubDate = strtotime($pubDate); $pubDate = date("Y-m-d", $pubDate); // GET DESCRIPTION $description = strval($item->description); if(str_contains($file_all, $link) OR $pubDate < $monday OR !str_contains($description, "https://mastodon.tomaszdunia.pl/tags/TDBNews")) { // IF LINK IS IN A FILE (IS ALREADY PROCESSED) // OR IF PUBLICATION DATE IS BEFORE MONDAY THIS WEEK (IS TOO OLD) // OR IF TOOT DOES NOT CONTAIN HASHTAG TDBNEWS (IS ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE) // THEN SKIP IT AND GO TO NEXT ONE continue; } else { // IF ALL CONDITIONS MET // PUSH LINK INTO A VARIABLE WITH QUALIFYING TOOTS $file_all .= $pubDate.";".$link."\n"; } } } // UPDATE THE FILE WITH LIST OF QUALIFYING TOOTS file_put_contents("tdbnews_all.txt", $file_all); ?>

Script generating a ready-made WordPress post

Just like in the previous code, everything is explained in the comments here as well.

<?php // LOAD FILE WITH ALL TDBNEWS TOOTS $file_all = file_get_contents("tdbnews_all.txt"); // DIVIDE FILE CONTENT INTO SEPARATE LINES $explode_file = explode("\n", $file_all); // SET TIME ZONE date_default_timezone_set("Europe/Warsaw"); // DATE OF MONDAY THIS WEEK TO FILTER EVERYTHING BEFORE THAT DATE $monday = strtotime("Monday this week"); $monday = date("Y-m-d", $monday); // DECLARATION OF AN ARRAY WITH THIS WEEK'S NEWS $news_array = array(); // GO THROUGH ALL LINES OF FILE ONE BY ONE foreach($explode_file as $line) { // IF LINE IS NOT EMPTY if(!empty($line)) { // SEPARATE PUBLISHING DATE AND LINK $explode_line = explode(";", $line); // IF PUBLISHING DATE IF NOT BEFORE MONDAT THIS WEEK if($explode_line[0] >= $monday) { // PUSH THIS TOOT INTO ARRAY WITH NEWS FOR THIS WEEK array_push($news_array, ['pubDate' => $explode_line[0], 'link' => $explode_line[1]]); } } } // REVERSE TABLE (SORT TOOTS FROM OLDER TO NEWER) $news_array = array_reverse($news_array); ?> <!-- SECTION WITH RESULT, STATIC INTRODUCTION, PHP CODE WITH FOREACH FUNCTION WHICH RESULT IS PRINT ALL TOOTS EMBEDED WITH IFRAME, STATIC ENDING --> <!-- PLAINTEXT ELEMENT IS USED TO PRINT HTML CODE IN RAW FORM --> <plaintext> <!-- wp:columns --> <div><!-- wp:column --> <div><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p> <em>#TDBNews</em> to nazwa pochodząca od <em>Tomasz Dunia Blog News</em>. Pod taką nazwą co niedzielę publikuję zbiór ciekawych wiadomości na jakie udało mi się natrafić w ubiegłym tygodniu. Zdecydowana większość linkowanych artykułów będzie anglojęzyczna, bo wszystkie źródła polskojęzyczne, które śledzę, są za <em>paywall'ami</em>.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --></div> <!-- /wp:column --> <!-- wp:column --> <div><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p> <em>#TDBNews</em> is a name coming from <em>Tomasz Dunia Blog News</em>. Under this name, every Sunday I publish a collection of interesting news that I came across in the previous week. The vast majority of linked articles will be in English, because all the Polish-language sources, I follow, are behind <em>paywalls</em>.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --></div> <!-- /wp:column --></div> <!-- /wp:columns --> <!-- wp:heading --> <h2>W tym tygodniu znalazłem / This week I found </h2> <!-- /wp:heading --> <?php foreach($news_array as $news) { echo " <!-- wp:html --> <iframe src=\"".$news['link']."/embed\" class=\"mastodon-embed\" style=\"max-width: 100%; border: 0\" width=\"100%\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe><script src=\"https://mastodon.tomaszdunia.pl/embed.js\" async=\"async\"></script> <!-- /wp:html --> "; } ?> <!-- wp:columns --> <div><!-- wp:column --> <div><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p> Jak widzisz to zestawienie powstaje poprzez osadzenie tootów (inaczej postów), które opublikowałem w poprzednim tygodniu na <em>Mastodonie</em>. Są one oznaczone specjalnym hashtagiem. To oznacza, iż informację o tych treściach możesz uzyskać jeszcze przed publikacją tego zestawienia. Wystarczy śledzić <a href="https://mastodon.tomaszdunia.pl/@to3k">mój profil na <em>Mastodonie</em></a> lub sam <a href="https://mastodon.tomaszdunia.pl/tags/TDBNews">hashtag <em>#TDBNews</em></a>.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --></div> <!-- /wp:column --> <!-- wp:column --> <div><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p> As you can see, this compilation is created by embedding toots (also known as posts) that I published last week on <em>Mastodon</em>. They are marked with a special hashtag. This means that you can access information about these contents even before this compilation is published. Just follow <a href="https://mastodon.tomaszdunia.pl/@to3k">my profile on <em>Mastodon</em></a> or the <a href="https://mastodon.tomaszdunia.pl/tags/TDBNews">hashtag <em>#TDBNews</em></a> itself.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --></div> <!-- /wp:column --></div> <!-- /wp:columns -->

Summary

Wasn’t it easy? In my opinion, it was not only simple but also worth the effort! How so? I have a principle that any automation of tasks, that are intellectually undemanding yet repetitive, makes sense and ultimately saves a lot of time. Let’s take the example of TDBNews. Creating such a summary manually would take me at least 20 minutes every week, but with the automation described above, it takes me no more than 3 minutes. Let’s consider those 15 minutes per week. In a year, we have 52 weeks, so I gain 780 minutes, which is 13 hours! That’s over half a day that I can spend with my family or even use to create another post for this blog.