chapter news planet should be more automated/easy to maintain

[Parker Phinney]

Here's what I'm imagining:
extend the chapter database python which scrapes data out of the google doc to do something like this:
* look for a field like "uses_chapter_hosting." if this is true, then the url for the feed is a simple transformation from the blog url (like, /feed or something)
* look for a separate field like "feed." this is the feed
* output all this data in the form of the right kind of config file to ~/planet/chapters-planet/config.ini

notes:
* make sure the code is in the svn repo (http://wiki.freeculture.org/Website_documentation#Subversion)
* run it as a chronjob

[Parker Phinney (gameguy43)]

The chapter news is kind of embarrassing right now because it includes so few active websites that it appears that our chapters aren't doing anything. We should fix that.

I wanted to find the config file, so i checked the website documentation wiki page and found the right info here:
http://wiki.freeculture.org/Website_documentation#The_Chapter_News_Feed_(and_the_personal_Planet)
that file is:
/home/freecult/planet/chapters-planet/config.ini

So the freecult user should run a cron that takes info, as described above, from the chapter database and generates that config file.

Implementing this is actually just a simple modification to some existing python that slurps out the chapter database info and does various things with it, including putting it in a nice json file. That code is here:
http://freeculture.org:8080/svn/googledoc-chapterdb-scripts/trunk/

[Parker Phinney (gameguy43)]

I'd really like to mentor someone on this rather than doing it myself because I'd like for someone else to be familiar with the python that I wrote for interfacing with the chapter database (and to help me know all the ways in which it sucks).

Is someone interested in working with me on this?

(sorry to double-post)