[GreenKeys] TTYs in news service and RSS feeds

[Joe Leitsch]

HI, John,

The Associated Press " Top Stories" RSS feed, similar to the Reuters feed can be found at:

http://hosted.ap.org/lineups/TOPHEADS-rss_2.0.xml?SITE=AZTUC&SECTION=HOME

or Google  " ap rss feed " for a list of all available AP RSS feeds or if the link doesn't work.

Other providers, such as CNN, can be found by Googling " rss news feed "

Your Python extractor / convertor program sounds like a great adjunct to ITTY and Heavy metal.
Is it proprietary or can it be made available for others to use? I'm trying to help a local Railway Museum with their Teletype display and this sounds like a perfect tool. 

Thanks,

Joseph L Leitsch, K4DMU
Louisville, KY    joe at iglou.com


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:24:22 -0700
From: John Nagle <nagle at animats.com>
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] TTYs in news service
To: greenkeys at mailman.qth.net
Message-ID: <49CFBCD6.3010604 at animats.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

     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.

> I'd also like to see if there is an archive of wire service news.

     The Stanford AI Lab used to receive the AP wire on their
SAIL computer, as a source of text.  The backup tapes from
that machine were transcribed to newer media over the years,
and a few years ago were copied to disk archives at IBM Almaden
by Bruce Baumgard of the Internet Archive and some others.
Somewhere in there is probably an archive of the AP wire.
But there would be copyright clearance problems.  How badly
do you need this info?

John Nagle