新闻汇总

Question

I need to create a news aggregator for our application, something similar to reading AP News from Yahoo, or something like http://popurls.com/ ; the problem is that I don't know how it works.
So, a couple of questions:
1) How do I determine what news site to aggregate? Do I hard-code the specific site's url into the application?
2) How do I know the url of the specific news? It's one thing to know the site name, but another to know the url of the specific news.
3) How do I embed the news content onto our application?
4) How do I determine (without specifically hard-coding everytime) the category(ies) each news should go?

Thank you very much for the help.

Answer 1

Generally there are software to do the aggregation and curation. There are some interesting projects like http://topnow.in which is light weight and does pull only top content from a particular source. It depends on your requirement how you want to create the aggregator web site.

Answer 2

Nowadays there are many APIs provided by different news websites such as Hacker News, Google News. Google even has a news API which collects many news from different tech websites.

Basically you just need to query the data from these APIs regularly and formalize them in your own application and present them to the user. The data returned by these APIs are usually JSON format, hence they are easy to process.

One very good example is the Technology Trend on The Earth application which collects news data from various sources and present them to the readers.

Answer 3

You can hardcode sites or request them from user (like iGoogle). After that you have to find the RSS url for the site and get the RSS for that site regularly (cron job can do it).