river is a River of News aggregator written in Python.

It takes a list of RSS/Atom feeds and checks them periodically. As new updates arrive, they're written out to an HTML file.

Before we can get started, we need a feed list. Creating one is easy, but for now we'll use one that already exists.

It's recommended to install river into a virtualenv:

$ virtualenv ~/river/
$ source ~/river/bin/activate
(river)$ pip install https://github.com/edavis/river/archive/v0.3.2.zip
(river)$ river -o ~/river/html/ http://www.techmeme.com/lb.opml

river will now start processing each feed in the feed list. This'll take a few minutes to complete.

Now let's see what the output HTML looks like. First, we start up a simple HTTP server so all external assets get loaded:

$ cd ~/river/html/
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Now, in your browser, visit http://localhost:8000/. If everything worked, you'll see a bunch of technology related news and blog posts. This is your river of news. Congrats!

river will keep checking the feeds until you tell it to stop. Refresh http://localhost:8000/ in half an hour or so and you'll see new feed items displayed at the top of the page.