Help needed, Matrix code project

[Sirius]

Hey, I recently started getting into programming and have an idea for an eventual project. The idea is a program that emulates the iconic Matrix falling code but instead of random letters and symbols, displays actual information from system info, to news articles, and weather updates.

Basically I was referred here and I need help. If any of you guys could tell me how I could go about making this it would be very appreciated.

[micha]

Hi and welcome to the community.

This is the right place for getting help. You have a very open questions and that makes it difficult for us to answer. Could you please break down your project in smaller problems and ask more specific.

What do you have so far? Where exactly are you stuck?

[Sirius]

Essentially what I need to know is how I can retrieve the data I need. The data would be from Facebook, news websites, email, system info, google notifications etc

[Plu]

At the core, you´d need some sort of library that can download data from the internet, like Luasocket:
http://w3.impa.br/~diego/software/luasocket/

Then, you'd need to either find other libraries that already implement the login mechanisms for all the things you want to connect with, or you'd have to implement them yourself.

System info can probably be polled more directly by using Lua's os library:
http://lua-users.org/wiki/OsLibraryTutorial

Any kind of publicly available information should also be easy to parse out of the site, although having access to an API will simplify things a lot.

For reading email you'd need an email library but I have no experience with those so I can't really recommend anything.

[slime]

At the core, you´d need some sort of library that can download data from the internet, like Luasocket:
http://w3.impa.br/~diego/software/luasocket/

To clarify, luasocket is built into LÖVE and accessible via 'require'.

[DaedalusYoung]

For data sources, look for RSS feeds. They're in an easy format, and the format is always the same, so you can just code it once and then let the user enter their own preferred feeds.