shireen

News and weather bot. Fetches current weather and forecasts from wttr.in, and streams headlines from configurable RSS feeds. Posts fresh headlines automatically at a per-channel interval and deduplicates across restarts.

Dependencies

No external libraries required (uses urllib and xml.etree.ElementTree).

Commands

Command	Description
`!weather <city>`	Current weather conditions
`!forecast <city>`	Brief forecast (today + next 2 days)
`!headlines [global\	mena\	egypt] [n]`	Fresh headlines, optionally filtered by label or count
`!news`	Show auto-broadcast state for this channel
`!news on`	Enable auto-broadcast (owner/op)
`!news off`	Disable auto-broadcast (owner/op)
`!news interval <min>`	Set broadcast interval in minutes (owner/op)
`!news count <n>`	Set headlines per broadcast cycle (owner/op)

Admin (owner)

Command	Description
`!join #channel`	Join a channel
`!part [#channel]`	Leave a channel
`!chans`	List channels
`!help`	Show usage (PM)

Auto-broadcast

Every 90 minutes (default, per channel) shireen posts 1 headline (default) it hasn't posted before. GUIDs are persisted to the data JSON so the same article is never repeated across restarts. The cap is 1000 seen GUIDs (oldest pruned). Interval and count are configurable per channel with !news interval and !news count.

URL cleaning

All query strings and fragments are stripped from feed links before posting. News article URLs are fully identified by their path; query parameters from feeds are always tracking noise.

Default RSS feeds

ID	Name	Label
`bbc_world`	BBC World	global
`reuters_world`	Reuters World	global
`ap_world`	AP News	global
`guardian_world`	The Guardian	global
`arab_news`	Arab News	mena
`aljazeera`	Al Jazeera	mena
`al_monitor`	Al-Monitor	mena
`egypt_indep`	Egypt Independent	egypt
`daily_news_egypt`	Daily News Egypt	egypt

Feeds can be modified directly in the data JSON (feeds array) while the bot is stopped. Each feed has: id, name, url, label, enabled.

Data file format

Created automatically at data_path on first run:

{
  "channels": {
    "#example": {
      "news_enabled": true,
      "broadcast_interval": 90,
      "broadcast_count": 1,
      "last_broadcast": 0
    }
  },
  "feeds": [...],
  "seen": ["guid1", "guid2"]
}

Config keys

Key	Default	Description
`[shireen] data_path`	`/var/shireen/data.json`	Path to state/config JSON (auto-created)
`[shireen] broadcast_interval`	`90`	Default minutes between auto-broadcast cycles
`[shireen] broadcast_count`	`1`	Default headlines posted per broadcast cycle
`[shireen] headlines_count`	`1`	Default headlines returned by `!headlines`