[GreenKeys] TTYs in news service

[Duncan M. Brown]

John,

I'm also interested in driving TTYs from news sources via the Internet for
a museum display.

Is your HTML to text and RSS polling software available?  

It would be great to have a TTY just start up, print out  some news and
then shut down!

Thanks,

Duncan Brown, K2OEQ

Chief TTY operator & repairman
AWA Electronic Communication Museum
http://www.antiquewireless.org/




>
>      Even today, Reuters stories have a headline length limit that
> will fit on a Teletype.
>
>      If you want current stories, you can get them from the Reuters
> RSS feed:
>
>      http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews?format=xml
>
> The Reuters feed is a good source; each story is about five lines,
> not just a headline.  Most other news feeds are just headlines or the
> first few words of each story, intended for use with programs that let
> you click on a link.  NPR's feed, though,
"http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php?id=1012",
> is also story-like enough to be useful.  Let me know if you find any
> other good feeds.
>
>     I have a Python program I keep running which polls the Reuters RSS
feed
> and drives a Model 15 Teletype.  Each time Reuters puts up a new story,
> the Teletype starts up, types it out, and shuts down again.  This works
> for any RSS feed; the format is standardized.  RSS is designed for this
> type of polling; there's a low-overhead way to ask if the feed has
changed.
>
>     I do some basic text processing to make the output look reasonable.
> Unicode is converted to ASCII, HTML markup is removed, all white space
> is converted to single spaces, word wrap is applied to break the lines
> at word boundaries, and a preliminary translation to a smaller character
> set is performed.  This last converts "[" to "(", "%" to " PCT. ", and
> such.  Finally the ASCII text is fed to ASCII->Baudot translation,
> which does the machine handling (CR, LF, LTRS, etc.)
>
>     The result gives the impression of a classic news Teletype.
>
>     This will probably go on display in a museum in the future,
> once I build a glass case for the machine to show off the works.
> I have contacts at the Exploratorium and the Computer Museum.
>
>
> 				John Nagle