Python Project - Create RSS feed of CSSE Dept. News

Due: Fri, 3/9, 6pm

This is a group project. Write a Python script, cssenewsfeed.py, to create a RSS feed of the news items at http://www.monmouth.edu/academics/CSSE/news.asp

Provide the following:

• The cssenewsfeed.py script
  • Use a Python package to retrieve the html code at http://www.monmouth.edu/academics/CSSE/news.asp.
  • Write the RSS feed XML file, cssenews.rss.xml, to disk.
    • A good location is in ~/public_html, so that it can be published to the Web.
    • cssenews.rss.xml will consist of the news headlines and url links to the corresponding sections of the CSSE department news page.
      • Example: If the headline “Departments of Computer Science and Software Engineering Merged” is chosen, the corresponding URL is http://www.monmouth.edu/academics/CSSE/news.asp#CSSEMerger .

• A URL at which your RSS feed can be tested:
  • Example: http://rockhopper.monmouth.edu/~jchung/cssenews.rss.xml

Use http://feedvalidator.org to validate your RSS feed.

The screen-scraping routines used in Python exercise 9 should be helpful for this project.

In cssenews.rss.xml, you may use either empty article descriptions, or extract the first two sentences of each news article and use that as a description.

As of 2/26/2012, there are 28 articles in http://www.monmouth.edu/academics/CSSE/news.asp .