Originally by Nelson Elhage for MIT Iron Bloggers, adapted by Marcus "chaosblog", finally hacked to pieces by me.

Use if you like, don't use if you don't, complaints will be ignored, patches will be welcomed.

1. Clone this repo

   git clone git@github.com:moeffju/iron-blogger.git

2. Create a virtualenv in the repo:

   cd iron-blogger
virtualenv .
source bin/activate

3. Install the required dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

   You will also need to install ledger (version 2.x) and mutt, preferably using your distro's package manager. For Debian, simply use apt-get install ledger mutt. You can find build ledger from the source tarball on GitHub.

1. Configure your settings:

cp settings.cfg.dist settings.cfg
vi settings.cfg

In the [general] block, configure the e-mail address that receives the reports, and the start date of your iron blogger run (in YYYY/MM/DD format).

In the [blogsettings] block, set xmlrpc_endpoint to the full URI of your blog's XMLRPC endpoint (for WordPress blogs, that is the blog's base URI + /xmlrpc.php). blog_id is usually 0, if not, you will know. username and password are the user data of a user that is allowed to write new entries (for the reports) and edit pages (for the participants list). participants_page_id is the ID of a page that will be overwritten with the participants list. Get the ID from the URL when you edit the page.

2. Configure your bloggers:

vi bloggers.yml

For each participant, add one entry like this:

```
twitter_nick:
  links:
  - ['Title of the first blog', 'http://example.org/blog']
  - ['Second blog title', 'http://example.com/', 'http://example.com/author/mattness/rss']
  name: 'Name of this blogger'
  start: 2012/12/31
  twitter: yes
```

twitter_nick must either be the participants Twitter nickname, or if they don't have a Twitter account, something that would work as a Twitter nickname (i.e. no spaces, no dashes, no high-ascii characters, etc.). If someone doesn't have a Twitter account, also change twitter: yes to twitter: no.

Each participant can have any number of blogs. If they post in either of them during one week, they are being counted. If they fail to blog in any, they will count as missing that week. For each blog, add a line in the format - ['Title', 'Blog URL', 'Feed URL']. Feed URL is optional (see first example line); the import-feeds.py script will try to complete feed URLs if they are missing. However, sometimes the script fails to find a feed, so you will have to know where to add it to the list.

The name can be anything. If it contains single quotes, just escape them by doubling them, like this: name: 'Matthias''s cool blog!'.

The start date is the date of the first day in the first time period in which this blogger participates in the iron blogging, in YYYY/MM/DD format.

3. Find missing feeds

Run ./import-feeds.py to try and automatically find missing feed URLs.

4. Create the ledger file

All data is kept in a ledger file in git, so make sure your script has a git repo to use:

git init

And create an empty ledger that is tracked by git:

touch ledger
git add ledger

Run ./scan-feeds.py to download and parse all feeds and write a report file (out/report.yml). This will throw errors or even fail catastrophically on broken or invalid feeds. If that happens, take those feeds out of your config and yell at the people who provide invalid feeds. Point them to feedvalidator.org. Repeat until you get a successful run of the script.

Now get some test output: Run ./weekly-update.py -n YYYY-MM-DD, replacing YYYY-MM-DD with the first day in the time period you want to run a report on. This date must be after the start date you specified in settings.cfg, obviously. You will get a weekly report on the standard output. No mail will be sent, ledger entries won't be persisted, and no report will be posted to your blog. If the output looks erroneous, good luck finding and fixing the error. Otherwise, you're good to go.

Every day, as often as you want, run:

./daily.sh

Every monday at or after midnight, run:

./daily.sh
./weekly.sh

By default, weekly.sh will ask for confirmation before running. If you want to run the scripts automatically from cron, you can add a parameter --trust-me to the invocation of weekly.sh.

To add new bloggers, just add them to bloggers.yml with the correct start date and run ./import-feeds.py.

To remove bloggers, either add an end: YYYY/MM/DD key to their entry in bloggers.yml, or just delete their entry.

To change someone's twitter nickname, change the key in bloggers.yml, their entries in the legder file, and the key in the out/report.xml file.

If a blog URL changes, change it in bloggers.yml and run ./scan-feeds.py USERNAME.

To let someone skip one or several weeks, simply add a key skip: [MM/DD/YYYY, MM/DD/YYYY, …] to their record. (Yes, this is a different date format. Not my fault. I didn't code it, and I'm too lazy to fix it. Patches are welcome, though.)