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by tn1 1896 days ago
I agree with the points brought up by the other two people in this thread. Especially the unread count stresses me out!

My personal wish is to be able to create feeds (or have a reader be able to essentially present in feed form) for websites that have no/inadequate feed.

My solution is a very simple set of PHP scripts that fetch a page with cURL and then scan the DOM for a CSS selector and put each item as an entry in a feed. There are services that do this, but they're paid and I'm a cheapskate :-D Unfortunately I have to tweak the scripts every so often to handle something I hadn't considered before.

2 comments

Inoreader lets you follow websites that don't provide an RSS feed. But it's a premium feature.
Are you thinking about releasing this? The services work well for this. Rss.app is one of the best ones.
Ok sure I just made the repo public: https://github.com/nijssen/web2rss

Here's an example of a feed: feed.php?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdotty.epfl.ch%2Fblog%2Findex.html&containersel=.post-list+%3E+li&titlesel=h2&datesel=time&datefmt=Y-m-j%7C&contentsel=.excerpt

Play around with it by doing: index.php?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdotty.epfl.ch%2Fblog%2Findex.html&containersel=.post-list+%3E+li&titlesel=h2&datesel=time&datefmt=Y-m-j%7C&contentsel=.excerpt

That's cool thanks!