This hackish shell script scrapes the stats pages at eternal-september.org and sorts article counts to get a better idea of what the active newsgroups are.

The script is extremely fragile and sensitive to HTML changes at Eternal September. But since that site looks like it's out of the 90s, we can hope such changes are neither desired nor frequent. :)

Not much:

• POSIX core utilities
• cURL

make will run the genpages.sh script that outputs a bunch of pages noisily in the current directory.

Edit that script and change the hierarchies line near the bottom to add or remove hierarchies.

make clean will blow away all the .html and .csv files in the same directory. So don't put anything there you don't want deleted. (The base HTML docs are in src/.)

Click here to see the output the last time I ran it.

And a very exciting dump of the build:

$ make clean
rm -f *.html *.csv

$ make
./genpages.sh
processing alt
generating alt.html
processing comp
generating comp.html
processing humanities
generating humanities.html
processing misc
generating misc.html
processing news
generating news.html
processing rec
generating rec.html
processing sci
generating sci.html
processing soc
generating soc.html
processing talk
generating talk.html
generating index.html

$ xdg-open index.html   # Browser activate!