Re:The Webpage, an online RSS reader and news aggregator, st...
by arussellsaw on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @08:07AM
(#22864889)
RSS feeds are a bit of a mess, but only due to each publisher's implementation being slightly different. the vast majority only send a headline and summary on the RSS feed, i then have to go and scrape and extract the article on the backend to populate the content, which is it's own challenge and i've not gotten it to work for a few sites yet.
This is also running in a semi-serverless container in Google Cloud Run (only costs me £1 a month!) so fetching and re-caching all of that when a new container is scheduled is painful, however it seems like state in the container is persisted longer than i initially thought, so it's good enough for now.
Re:The Webpage, an online RSS reader and news aggregator, st...
by k1m on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @08:23AM
(#22865003)
You might have come across this already, but we maintain a collection of article extraction rules for various sites here https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config - it was adapted from a database maintained by Instapaper in its early days and today has contributions mainly from users and developers of an open source Instapaper/Pocket alternative called Wallabag: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag
Also usable with a free version of Full-Text RSS available here: https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss/src/master/
Re:The Webpage, an online RSS reader and news aggregator, st...
by jkeuhlen on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @10:40AM
(#22866544)
This looks really interesting! I've been building an RSS reader for myself in my free time, and this will be really useful. I was wondering if you know anything about the legal implications around scraping full-content like this and packaging it up? I was planning to do it with some fun added-on features, but was worried it would be considered copy-right infringement (since I would basically be re-hosting other site's content without permission). And some websites outright ban this kind of usage in the TOS for their RSS feeds. For example, from the Washington Post[1]
> a. For any article, you may not display more text than we provide in the RSS feed.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/rss-terms-of-service/2012/01/...
Do RSS feeds have "just" text that you pull to get the article content, or are you parsing the webpage somehow? If so, how?
I've done something slightly (well, about 1% :-) similar for the "Popular" page on pinboard[0]. It used to have a line or two from the start of the article, using a webpage content extractor that got turned off, so I can't use it anymore.
One arguably nice thing about mine is that it's updated once a day, and it remembers what you've read yesterday, so new articles are marked, and you can flip a switch to see the new stuff first.
Thanks!
[0] https://pbpb.cls.cloud