Getting Started With CLI

Raintale allows you to quickly publish your story using a variety of different storytellers corresponding to different file formats and social media services. The input for Raintale consists of text content and memento URLs (URI-Ms). Raintale will then publish the text verbatim and summarize the archived web pages (e.g., mementos, captures, snapshots, URI-Ms) as surrogates (cards, thumbnails, etc.).

Note

Raintale only works for memento URLs (URI-Ms) from Memento-compliant web archives. It will not work for live web resources or mementos from web archives that do not support the Memento protocol. To create mementos of live web pages, use tools like the Save Page Now tool at the Internet Archive, the ArchiveNow Python utility, or the Mink Chrome Extension.

Quickly Creating an HTML Story

Once the installation is complete, you will have access to the tellstory command.

Telling an HTML story with Raintale requires three pieces of information:

  • the title of your story - this example uses a title of This is My Story Title
  • a file containing a list of archived web pages (e.g., mementos, captures, snapshots, URI-Ms) - this example uses a file named story-mementos.txt
  • the name of the file to write your story - this example uses mystory.html

Thus, to generate an HTML story with Raintale using the default options, perform the following:

tellstory -i story-mementos.txt --storyteller html -o mystory.html --title "This is My Story Title"

Note how the --storyteller argument instructs Raintale how to tell your story. In this case, we supplied the html value to tell a story using HTML.

Quickly Creating a Twitter Story

To create a twitter story, you will need the following:

  • the title of your story
  • a file containing a list of archived web pages (e.g., mementos, captures, snapshots, URI-Ms)
  • A file containing your Twitter credentials - this example uses twitter-credentials.yml

To acquire Twitter credentials, 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.

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

To tell your Twitter story, type the following:

tellstory -i story_mementos.txt --storyteller twitter --title "This is My Story Title" -c twitter-credentials.yml

Note how, in this case, the --storyteller argument was supplied the twitter value. This instructed Raintale to publish a story to Twitter rather than writing it out to a file.

To see a complete list of storytelling capabilities via the tellstory command refer to Raintale Options section.