Top Stories
The purpose of this is to show the top news stories from a specified period of time. However, it only has data from 27/05/05 onwards.
It can output in RSS, HTML or plain text formats, and the time period can be easily changed, as well as the number of news articles shown. As an example, the RSS output for the top stories for the past week is at https://backstage.min-data.co.uk/topstories/?o=rss .
One of the troubles with it was working out how to rank the importance of the news articles. In the end I went for a simple system, where each time the url appeared in the top 3 items of the main Â鶹Éç news feed, it got a certain number of points (5 for being the top item, 3 for the 2nd and 1 for being 3rd). It was pointed out that the urls may change, as well as the titles and descriptions, but working out which one is which really is too much work, so I decided that they were suitably different to be classed as different news items.
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