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Comment by k1m | Hacker News Reader

Very nice! I work on Feed Creator - https://createfeed.fivefilters.org - which is similar, although unlike yours doesn't use a headless browser, so selecting Javacript-inserted elements isn't supported.

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That looks great! I ran into a couple of feed generators when I first needed this myself, but they were either paid or clumsy to use. That's when I thought, "alright, I can build this myself, and then I can even use CSS selectors, since I'm comfortable with those anyway". Of course, that is the point I should've thought about explicitly searching for one that supported that :)

Ah well. What I do like about my current approach is that I have full control without having to run my own server, which is nice.

Here's a list of RSS feed generators:

https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS#webpagehtml

The more the merrier! :) And always nice to see more in the RSS space.

Feed Creator is in PHP and unlike yours doesn't produce a static file. The CSS selectors, URL and other parameters are all embedded in the URL, e.g.

  https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/extract.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fjohnpilger.com%2Farticles&item=.entry&item_desc=.intro&item_date=.entry-date

The biggest issue I've found is people struggling to work out which CSS selectors to use. I wrote a blog post not that long ago to help people use the browser's developer tools to do that. Might help too with anyone trying to use this (although perhaps most of the HN audience doesn't need help here): https://www.fivefilters.org/2021/how-to-turn-a-webpage-into-...

Since everyone is pitching their own, I built https://github.com/fran-penedo/rssify, which started as a fork of https://github.com/h43z/rssify. The basic functionality is similar to Vinnl's: give it a URL and some selectors and it builds the RSS feed. From this, I added a few things: templates (if you want to subscribe to individual projects within a webpage, like fanfics in ao3), transforms (when the data is not quite the text of the DOM element), a flask server you can use to add new URLs you have a template for and update the feeds, and a userscript to add the current URL using the server.

My effort in this space is "furss", though it starts from an rss feed then aims to scrape the full article instead of an extract. https://github.com/jepler/furss

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