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RSS Box – RSS for websites that do not support RSS

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Re: RSS Box – RSS for websites that do not support RSS

#101

Related (maybe) but tangential, does anyone know of a good web to text converter? Back in the day you used to just use Lynx, is that still the way or has it been surpassed?

Pandoc can convert HTML to Markdown and other text formats:

https://pandoc.org/

Re: RSS Box – RSS for websites that do not support RSS

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey thanks for this lovely pitch, goblin89. <3 all my goblin friends out there

I learned of Fraidycat in an RSS related HN comment yesterday and have been trying it out. Love some of the homemade quirkiness that I forgot software used to have -- the video is great too. Only question I have: do you really have to assign every Github issue to yourself, the sole developer? Something about it cracks me up: https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues > "Thanks for the bug report. Fortunately for…

Oh I feel such a sense of progress just assigning bugs to myself. When I get around to writing a blog post about it, I certainly hope you will be there to upvote it, hombre f.

Re: RSS Box – RSS for websites that do not support RSS

#104
post #25

Off topic but since we are talking about RSS feeds: Is there a web service to replay feeds? Use case are old blog archive one wants to (re-) read sequentially from the start but not in binge mode. So maybe one post per day or week. I'm thinking about the old posts of Aaron Swartz or Steve Yegge. Just adding the feed to a feed reader is often not sufficient because the feed only contains the last 20 entries or so.

I once made a Python commandline utility for this, which does still work if you can install it with the right (now long-outdated) Python version: https://pypi.org/project/dripfeed/

I don't intend to maintain it further but all source code is available and it's not terribly complicated (all the hard stuff is done by other python libraries).

Re: RSS Box – RSS for websites that do not support RSS

#105
post #56

The service https://feed43.com will enable you you to build a RSS feed out of pretty much anything with a URL. I use it to build RSS out of sha256 release files, vendor client download release pages, changelogs, etc.

Similar service: https://politepol.com/en/

I would say this is a simpler service overall and not an even competitor, it appears to be using HTML elements as keys and creating entries based on that but stops there. I would not consider this on par with Feed43 based on the few samples I tried, it lacks in depth parsing required to handle the expected result formatting.

Re: RSS Box – RSS for websites that do not support RSS

#107
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSSBox used to have Facebook support (but only for public pages, no personal content), but when Facebook started cordoning off their API two years ago, I had to turn it off since I was unable to get my application approved. The code is still there, but I am doubtful it would work even if you manage to get an API key that works. I think the best option may be to scrape the web content now, unfortunately.

I have assumed for a while the only way to convert FB -> RSS would be to scrape the home page, but from what I recall the HTML & DOM is all kinds of messed up - intentionally obfuscated to prevent adblocking. From a quick look just now it does seem like it would be a nightmare to try to parse it as-is - and I would guess FB changes a lot of the output regularly anyway to defeat adblockers, making efforts to keep up p…

It almost sounds like a problem best solved with OCR, rather than scraping per se. Build a simple model to recognize “posts” from screenshots, and output the rectangular viewport regions of their inner content; then build some GIS-like layered 2D interval tree of all the DOM regions, such that you could ask Puppeteer et al to filter for every DOM node with visibility overlap with that viewport region; extract every single Unicode grapheme-cluster within those nodes separately, annotated with its viewport XY position; and finally, use the same kind of model that lets PDF readers you highlight “text” (i.e. arbitrary bags of absolute-positioned graphemes) in PDFs, to “un-render” the DOM nodes’ bag of positioned graphemes back into a stream of space/line/paragraph-segmented text.

Re: RSS Box – RSS for websites that do not support RSS

#108
I don't know if anyone will particularly care, but both Substack and MailChimp newsletters have RSS feeds, in case you prefer those over mail. With Substack, you merely append "feed/" to the end.

With Mailchimp, well, you look for a "view in browser" or "share this issue with friends" link in the newsletter. On the archive page it takes you to, an RSS link is on the righthand corner.

Re: RSS Box – RSS for websites that do not support RSS

#109

serious question: does anybody use RSS nowadays?

Yes (though I personally have only ever used it as a notification mechanism: I just click through to the page, and don't read the content in the reader. In fact the RSS reader I built for myself doesn't support any other mode). I follow over 100 different feeds through this, mostly on different sites (it's mostly webcomics, some news, artists, and youtube channels). It would be basically impossible to do this with any other tech: at best my feeds would be fragmented across multiple services. Some would not be possible to integrate at all. Services like this allow some of the sites I want to follow to fit into the system.
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