This is mostly an attempt to get the hang of Ruby and how it fits in the context of the data journalistic approach i am trying to take.
The function the script is supposed to perform is that of parsing the RSS feeds of 3 major newsrooms in Greece, fetch the articles and extract information such as title, publication date and most importantly, provided source. The result gets stored in a sqlite3 database which has a very simple schema - see source for details.
To run this, you need a Ruby runtime environment and bundler installed. After cloning, execute
bundle install
followed by
ruby crawler.rb
This will go off and fetch all the latest news from the 3 sites, storing them in a database in the same directory - a file news.db will be created to hold it.
That's about it for now, if there is interest in this work, i'll share more information.