11–19 of 19 posts
I got my first reporting job after writing a bot to scrape the SEC for filings by major financial figures. Data journalism is very sexy! Unfortunately it's still very hard to find that story needle, and increasingly so when you open up the data aperture.
Funny, it talks about being easy, but I had a hard time finding a snippet of the real use.
To have a look at some snippets, I would recommend going through the wizard, then cracking open one of the examples. The plumbing is a bit overly-complicated, though, I am sure there is a way to make queries in a simpler way.
There's another open-source tool named Huginn[1] that does something like this. You write "agents" that perform a given task and then pass the resulting onto other agents that do things like run stats, send emails, etc. [1]: https://github.com/cantino/huginn
Two other tools do similar things too:
- Datawi.re, by Annabel Church [1]
- Stream Tools, by the NYT [2]
[1]: http://datawi.re/ [2]: http://nytlabs.github.io/streamtools/
Nice job but why do you require postfix?!
You should be using either sendmail/mailx or a custom user/password SMTPD server (e.g. google's smtpd).
Hello, Nice job but why do you require postfix?! You should be using either sendmail/mailx or a custom user/password SMTPD server (e.g. google's smtpd).
To actually send the mails, we use the aptly named 'nodemailer' module, with the 'smtp' transport mechanism, which also relies on a running SMTP server. (btw, one can use a 'sendmail' transport mechanism).
The install procedure is a bit complex, this should just be done with a "npm install -g ..". Especially the install.sh only works on Linux. Otherwise very cool idea :-)
I have hard time reconciling:
"Don't know how to code? That's fine."
With:
"The code is available on Github, and that's where you should start. Just clone the repo and run the installation script located at root."
I think you seriously overestimate the layman's abilities here. Is this for programming laymen? Github is one of the last things people learn, for better or worse.
Intriguing, nonetheless. Will follow.
The install procedure is a bit complex, this should just be done with a "npm install -g ..". Especially the install.sh only works on Linux. Otherwise very cool idea :-)