Google Alert RSS Feed Poster

Submit link posts from Google Alert RSS feeds to target subreddits.

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Dependancies

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• PRAW
• Requests
• Unidecode
  • I got lazy when decoding the Unicode to work on Openshift

Makes posts using the PRAW library while tracking posts made and history via a sqlite3 database.

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Configuration

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All configurations are made via the config.json file.

{
    "user_agent": "",
    "username": "",
    "password": "",
    "check_rate": 60,
    "resubmit": false,
    "feeds": [
        {
            "url": "https://www.google.com/alerts/feeds/09844433320831210961/3504146379976622958",
            "subreddits": [
                "Test"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

• user_agent
  • What Google and Reddit sees the bot as, the more unique this is the better.
• username
  • Username of the reddit account making the posts.
• password
  • Password of the Reddit account making the posts.
• check_rate
  • How often - in seconds - to check the RSS feeds and make posts.
• resubmit
  • If the bot should repost a link even though it's been posted before according to Reddit.
  • This only applies to the bots first post, as it won't resubmit if it has already posted before.
• feeds
  • List of Feed objects.

A feed consists of two properties:

• url
  • The URL to the Google Alert RSS feed.
• subreddits
  • List of subreddits to post the feed items to.

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Technical Breakdown

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Databases

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The bot has two databases, posted and history.

Posts

URL	Title	UTC	Permalinks	Subreddits
http://example.com/	Example thing	1451606400	http://reddit.com/Test/1234567/example-com/	Test

Permalinks and Subreddits are added two if there are more then two subreddits the item is posted to.

Only 1000 entries are kept in the table.

History

URL	Title	UTC	Permalink	Subreddit
http://example.com/	Example thing	1451606400	http://reddit.com/Test/1234567/example-com/	Test

This is an log of the posting the bot has done.

Only 1000 entries are kept in the table.

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Walkthough

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• Tables and triggers are created if they're don't already exist.
• Reddit is logged into.
• While the bot is running:
  • List of items are gotten from all feeds
  • For every item in the list of items:
    • An attempt is made to get the posted database entry with the same URL of the current item.
    • For every target subreddit the item needs to be posted to:
      • If there is an entry in the database for the current item and the subreddits column contains the current subreddit, the post is not made.
      • An attempt to make the post is made
      • The database is updated.
  • The bot waits check_rate seconds, and does the above items again.

Web-GUI

It's a simple GUI that shows the contents of the posts or history tables in list form.

The Toggle button switches between Posts and History.

The Refresh button does as it says, and refreshes the current content.

The Next and Previous buttons - when available - show the next or previous ten entries in the current database.

Technical details

The backend API is as such:

/api/table_name&range=0-10

where table_name is the name of the current table - posts or history, the first number in range is the number of the element to start from, and the second number is how many elements to fetch.