Raintale

Raintale is a utility for publishing social media stories from groups of archived web pages (mementos). Raintale uses MementoEmbed to extract memento information and then publishes a story to the given storyteller, a static file or an online social media service.

Raintale accepts the following inputs:

• a file containing a list of memento URLs (URI-Ms) (required)
• a title for your story (required)
• the URL of the underlying collection (optional)
• the author, organization, or algorithm that generated the story (optional)
• the storyteller to use when generating the story (e.g., HTML, Twitter, Markdown)
• an output file for saving the story (if applicable)
• a credential file for the a social media service (if applicable)
• a template file allowing the user to format their story differently than the defaults (optional, and not supported by all storytellers)

Raintale supports the following storytellers:

• facebook - (EXPERIMENTAL) publishes a story as a Facebook thread, with titles, snippets, URLs, and memento-datetimes supplied by MementoEmbed
• html - the HTML that makes up a story, suitable for pasting into a web page or a blogging application such as Blogger
• twitter - publishes a story as a Twitter thread, with titles, URLs, memento-datetimes, and images supplied by MementoEmbed
• template - given input data and a template file, this storyteller generates a story formatted based on the template and saves it to the given output file, allowing the end user to format their own stories
• jekyll-html - writes output to Jekyll HTML file format, suitable for use with Jekyll and GitHub pages
• jekyll-markdown - writes output to Jekyll Markdown file format, suitable for use with Jekyll and GitHub pages
• markdown - writes output to the GitHub Flavored Markdown file format, suitable for pasting into GitHub
• mediawiki - writes output to this MediaWiki file format, suitable for pasting into MediaWiki pages
• video - (EXPERIMENTAL) creates an MP4 file containing the top images and sentences from the mementos in your story

Railtale also supports a number of presets for formatting a story for output to a specific file format:

• default - provides a default set of fields like those seen in the social cards from social networking; may also provide an approximation, depending on file format (html, markdown, mediawiki, and jekyll storytellers)
• thumbnails3col - provides a 3 column layout containing thumbnails of the submitted mementos (HTML storyteller only)
• thumbnails4col - provides a 4 column layout containing thumbnails of the submitted mementos (HTML storyteller only)

Note that not all file formats support all presets.

Running Raintale

Raintale uses docker-compose to load and execute all dependencies. To run Raintale, do the following:

1. Create a directory on your system
2. Copy docker-compose.yml from this repository into that directory
3. Open a terminal
4. Type: docker-compose run raintale tellstory --help to find the list of options

For example to create a raw HTML story suitable for pasting, type the following within that prompt:

docker-compose run raintale tellstory -i story-mementos.txt --storyteller html -o mystory.html --title "This is My Story Title" --generated-by "Me"

The output will be stored in mystory.html.

To create a twitter story, you will need to create a Twitter app. Log into Twitter from a web browser and visit https://developer.twitter.com/en/apps for more information. Once you have created an app, make a file named twitter-credentials.yml, save it in the same directory, and fill it with the following content.

consumer_key: XXXXXX
consumer_secret: XXXXXX
access_token_key: XXXXXX
access_token_secret: XXXXXX

Replace the XXXXXX values with the corresponding values as displayed on your Twitter app page.

Once that is done, type the following within the Docker prompt:

docker-compose run raintale tellstory -i story_mementos.txt --storyteller twitter --title "This is My Story Title" --generated-by "Me” -c twitter-credentials.yml

Building Raintale

Raintale uses pip for build and installation. Clone this repository and type the following from the root of the source code:

pip install .

to build and install the version from the source code on your machine.

The future of Raintale

We are working on additional storytellers and presets. Storytellers must be either a file format or an online service that supports an API. The choice in storyteller is highly dependent upon the capabilities and terms of that online service's API.