Intro
I tend to spend alot of time in the #zacon channel mostly because its really cool place to hang out but also because I learn alot from the people there. Sadly I cant be there all the time of every single day. A little while back I noticed that I was missing really interesting URLs that people has posted while I was away, now while I could look back through the logs for the previous day/night, this started to become a little tedious. Also it doesnt help that other people also had this problem.
So the solution I present is the zaconURL watcher, a bot written in Node.js that sits in the channel and silently logs all URLs that are pasted. Simple idea with a simple implementation , thankfully with a bit of feedback from guys in the channel I got to add a few more features such as a RSS feeds (Per person or the entire channel) and tagging for each of the URLs.
App Stack
Building this was mostly to learn Node.js and get a app out in a single day for a framework I have never used (This probably shows in the code so please be gentle).
The various libs that were used are listed below.
Bot : Node.js
- IRC
- Mongoose
General : MongoDB
Web: Django pymongo
The End
Thats it really there is nothing more that I think can be said. If you need specifics on something feel free to shout , I will drop the code for the bot online sometime soon if anyone cares to check it out.
Also if you feel so inclined check out the site and all data captured so far at urls.runawaycoder.co.za