RSS for the RSS-less

Nader K. Rad, 2021-07-25

There's a website that posts local art events in my region. Do you believe that it doesn't have RSS/ATOM?

I've contacted them about it, and they promised to ask their IT team to check it. We all know what it means.

However, the problem is now solved using scripts and filters in my feed reader, Newsboat. If you're a Newsboat user and don't know about it, take a look; there's a good chance you can do great things with it:

Newsboat documentation, the scripts and filters section

This is how it works: You can prepare a script to read the web page and output an RSS feed based on its content. First, I tried to use their index page to create the feed, but then I realized that it's a lot easier to use their sitemap for that. However, neither gives me enough information about the page, and I wanted to have at least a summary of the page to read in Newsboat and only open the page if it's interesting. So, the script builds an array of the last n posts based on the sitemap and then reads each of those pages and extracts their description meta tag as the item's body. I could pull the whole content from the page, but the fact is that the website I wanted to convert doesn't have much content on each of those pages, and the meta description gives me most of the information I was looking for.

I'm really happy about this discovery!