Tuesday, March 24, 2009

IT Help!

I'm currently supervising the revamping of my company's website which is now basically an easy-to-use CMS system. There's a bit that has the latest news section scrolling on the right.

My question is this: Is there some sort of program that detects the latest news regarding my company from local news sites and automatically adds them onto the scrolling latest news menu depending on the language of the page at hand?

For instance, let's say I work at Banana United. I would want to install a program that detects current news regarding Banana United on the English version of the website and the Arabic. For the English website, the main news sources that this program will use to pick up on current news concerning Banana United would be from the online news sites of Kuwait Times, Arab Times and Al-Watan Daily. For the Arabic, it would be from the online news sites of Al-Qabas, Al-Rai, Al-Watan, etc.

I asked the website creator if such a program exists but he said that he has never heard of anything like that before. But I'm left here thinking, "There must be other people in my shoes who would want such a program because typing everything out manually every week and linking it to the actual news source online is rather time consuming."

If you have the answer to this, please share it in the comments section below or email me at erzulie1985@hotmail.com. If you don't and you know someone/a company that might help me out, let me know of that as well. Thank you.

MP3's...
Bullion - I Just Wasn't Made For These Times likes this...
Coldcut - Stop This Crazy Thing
Funkdoobiest - Sunshine
Funkdoobiest feat. B-Real - Wopbabalubop
FPI - Everybody (All Over The World) (Brown Version)(A1)

at 8:30 AM

7 Comments

  1. Blogger Unknown posted at 8:55 AM  
    Google Alerts is your friend. They can RSS or Atom feed a search result, so you don't have to.
  2. Blogger MBH posted at 9:43 AM  
    1) Some blog posts have been removed due to them linking to copyrighted material. I know you've been doing this for a long time, but it's better than losing your pages!

    2) It is easily doable if the news sites use RSS feeds.

    If they don't, then you'd need a program to go into each website and parse the news headers (or download PDF pages and parse them).
    This is not easy because each news website is implemented differently, and they change every few months.

    3) You can search on Google.com.kw (via a script) for your company's name, and classify the search as news (example)
  3. Blogger Zeecu posted at 12:52 PM  
    ..and there's always the chance that the search engine will pickup some incorrect/undesirable search result and post it on your company's site, which would be embarrassing.

    (e.g. Banana united loses 5m of revenue to chiquita enterprises) or (Man eats 200 bananas, vomits for 5 straight hours, gets attacked by apes)

    Thus, manual entry of the news is my advice.
  4. Blogger KTDP posted at 2:58 PM  
    yahoo pipes is your answer. [pipes.yahoo.com]
    the best way to understand it is by thinking about it as applescript for your news feeds.

    It can take feeds from search engines (e.g. google news) remove censored words and your own domain and serve it as a feed which you can either serve it up as a news ticker or or in a box.
  5. Blogger MBH posted at 3:59 PM  
    LOL @ Zeecu!

    You could have the search engine aggregate the news for the admin, then the admin manually selects which ones to publish.

    Isn't your avatar from the game Grim Fandango?
  6. Blogger Erzulie posted at 12:31 AM  
    thank you all for your input. i've just sent the website guy your replies and i'm waiting to see what he can make of it. and zeecu, you have a point there. well, i think it's easier to delete a handful of poopy news rather than manually writing down hundreds per year. but thanks for the lovely example :P
  7. Blogger Zeecu posted at 5:45 PM  
    I guess MBH's idea of moderating the search engine results is a good solution.

    MBH: Yes. Salvador limones, revolutionary, and head of the LSA. Viva la revolucion!

Post a Comment

« Home