My younger brother, who still lives in China is a fan of Michael Phelps. He wants to see his twitter posts. Since they can't access twitter behind the GFW and setting up a VPN is too hard for my mom. I want to write something that grabs the twitter and sends them to my mom's email.
I use python as my main language. Familiar with tweepy / request / scrapy
I have tried or thought about three ways of doing this:
Use the twitter API and grabs the user_timeline. However, this method will lost all graphical data and throws a bunch of useless links that are only visible after proper rendering
Do a web scraping and save the html content. Then send the html file as an attachment. However, this method still loses some graphical contents and is not that user friendly to someone in her 40s. In addition, it will be kinda hard to tell how many tweets I have scraped and if there's any updates.
Wrap the html content in the email and use html rendering within the email. I haven't work with this before so I am not exactly sure how its gonna work out.
I am aware that "what's the best way to do this" kinda question is always downvoted on SO but I do believe this problem is particular enough to engage meaningful Q&As. Any suggestion will be appreciated.
Have you thought of using selenium and taking screen shots of the browser window? Taking a screen shot with selenium is as easy as
browser.get('twitter.com')
browser.get_screenshot_as_file('twitter_screenshot.png')
You'd have to figure out a way to automate both watching for new tweets and running the selenium script when a new tweet is found. However in terms of preserving graphical content, taking screenshots w/ Selenium would be simple to implement.