Personalized WhatsApp News Feed

A small Python app that fetches news from selected sources, ranks stories by personal interests, and sends a daily digest to WhatsApp through Twilio.

Topics

• FC Barcelona from Barca Universal
• AI, tech companies, and consumer social apps from TechCrunch
• Indian economy from The Hindu
• Indian elections from The Hindu and Google News RSS
• Startup funding from TechCrunch, Inc42, Entrackr, and Google News RSS
• World geopolitics and economy from Google News RSS and BBC World

RSS is used wherever possible because it is more stable than scraping. Lightweight page scraping is used only for source pages that do not expose a useful RSS feed.

Setup

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
cp .env.example .env

Fill in .env with your Twilio WhatsApp credentials.

Run

Print a terminal digest:

python -m news_feed.main

Create an HTML preview at output/digest.html:

python -m news_feed.html_preview

To send on WhatsApp, set this in .env:

SEND_WHATSAPP=true

Then run:

python -m news_feed.main

Schedule

Example cron job for 8:00 AM India time:

TZ=Asia/Kolkata
0 8 * * * cd /path/to/news-feed && /path/to/news-feed/.venv/bin/python -m news_feed.main >> /path/to/news-feed/news-feed.log 2>&1

Project Structure

• news_feed/config.py: topics, keywords, limits, and source URLs
• news_feed/fetchers.py: RSS and webpage fetching
• news_feed/ranker.py: deduping, recency filtering, and scoring
• news_feed/formatter.py: WhatsApp text formatting
• news_feed/html_formatter.py: browser preview formatting
• news_feed/sender.py: Twilio WhatsApp delivery
• news_feed/main.py: main daily digest command