Thanks for all the feedback and for the positive vibes. I don't mind sharing what's behind Mood News as it is fairly simple and unoriginal process. The system works much like a search engine, assigning points to various keywords. On the first run of the script I threw in some keywords and was surprised how well this worked so I stuck with it. There's some more complex stuff in there now such as checking a keyword is present when another is not.
This is all in a messy flat Python script adapted from my RSS-to-MP3 application. So it does need a bit of refactoring and the publishing process made automatic. I also want to separate out the Scoring System from the presentation so different strategies can be tried and compared side by side. From a development and reader point of view it would be nice to have an audit trail of why a story received a particular rating. Yes colours seem almost essential in an application like this. I'd like the Good/Bad/Neutral categories only used for summaries and have the stories marked by an appropriate shade. Well better get to work on all of this - thanks again everyone. Cheers, Davy Mitchell http://www.latedecember.com - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html.
