Atomisator, visiting links

I am writing a plugin for Atomisator that detects when a post is a Reddit or a Delicious entry, and adds a sample from the page it links to.

On a Reddit feed for example, you will basically get a meaningful title, and summary that will look like this:
[link] [comments]

This is not really useful in a feed...

So basically, the plugin I am writing is detecting this kind of entries and is grabbing a sample out of the linked page, so the entry is transformed like this:
Extract from the link:

   ... blablablba


   blablabla...

[link] [comments]

The extracted text is a pure text, extracted using BeautifulSoup and the SGML parser from the standard library.

This is quite useful as long as the begining of the web page is meaningful, which is rarely the case... Most of the time the web page starts with a gibberish text, like a menu bar content for instance.

So I am trying to detect what is the "best" part of the web page pointed by the link.

To do so, I am using the title of the entry, which is suppose to make sense. Since there are good chances the text will contain the words used in the title, I am looking for them into the page.

I have tried several combinations, even by trying to find the smallest sample where I get the maximum number of words from the title by doing some cartesian products. But this was too slow.

Instead, I am trying to detect the real beginning of the post by trying some common patterns : most of the time the body of the post is a div tag with a class attribute like body, content, article-content, etc..

I am running it now over the Python feed at Reddit, and the results start to look nice so far (==you can understand what the page talks about most of the time). See here:http://www.ziade.org/atomisator/filtered.xml

Now I will try to run it over a fair amount of entries and with various sources to try to tune up the extractor.

This code will also be a useful base to visit links of any kind of entry, but it needs a lot of cleanup: I have spotted some quadratic complexity parts I need to get ridd of.

Try it yourself :
1. make sure you have SQLite installed 2. install atomisator with easy_install atomisator 3. create your atomisator.cfg file with the content below 4. then run it by calling 'atomisator' in the folder atomisator.cfg lives

atomisator.cfg content :
atomisator

sources =

    rss http://www.reddit.com/r/Python.rss reddit



database = sqlite:///atomisator.db

file = atomisator.xml

title = Meta feed

description = Automatic feed created by Atomisator.

link =

filters =

    reddit