A modification of TPM's sample sinatra app (Paperboy Distributor) based on the paperboy gem for generating HTML newsletters from popular stories.

In one step, newsletter.rb uses Chartbeat historical data to generate a complete HTML file containing a list of the most viewed stories from your site over the past four hours.

Paperboy aggregates stories from chartbeat's snapshots endpoint over a given time period and scrapes the URLs for META tags containing images and blurbs to create ready-made or templateable emails.

Make sure you have Paperboy (sudo gem install paperboy)

git clone git://github.com/rnagle/paperboy-newsletter-generator.git
cd paperboy-newsletter-generator
Rename opts.yml.sample to opts.yml, fill in your chartbeat credentials and xpath prefs (for slurping up images and descriptions from META tags)

Open newsletter.rb and fill in custom filters.

The newsletter.erb file is the template file Paperboy will run stories through. The template loops through a @stories array. Each item in the array has the components:

item[:url]
item[:hed]
item[:img]
item[:blurb]

See a sample bare-bones structure here.

Run app with ruby newsletter.rb View HTML file in public/index.html

Copyright (c) 2010 TPM Media LLC

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