2024-07-16
It's time for... Dan Shares Yet Another FreshRSS XPath Scraping Recipe!
I'm a huge fan of the XPath scraping feature of FreshRSS, my favourite feed reader (and one of the most important applications in my digital ecosystem). I've previously demonstrated how to use the feature to subscribe to Forward, reruns of The Far Side, and new The Far Side content, despite none of those sites having "official" feeds.
Signup form for VMail from Vole.WTF
Vmail is cool. It's vole.wtf's (of ARCC etc. fame) community newsletter, and it's as batshit crazy as you'd expect if you were to get the kinds of people who enjoy that site and asked them all to chip in on a newsletter.
Totes bonkers.
But email's not how I like to consume this kind of media. So obviously, I scraped it.
Screenshot showing VMail subscription in FreshRSS
Want to subscribe to Vmail using your own copy of FreshRSS? Here's the settings you're looking for -
It's just a table with each row being a newsletter; simple!
The dates are in a format that's like 01 May '24 - two-digit days with leading zeros, three-letter months, and a two-digit year preceded by a curly quote, separated by spaces. That curl quote screws up PHP's date parser, so we have to give it a hint.
Optional, but each issue's got its own unique ID already anyway; we might as well use it!
Optional, but recommended: this option lets you read the entire content of each newsletter without leaving FreshRSS.
So yeah, FreshRSS continues to be amazing. And lately it's helped me keep on top of the amazing/crazy of vole.wtf too.
My blog post announcing how valuable FreshRSS's XPath Scaping feature is
My blog note about my FreshRSS addiction
A 2019 blog post about my digital ecosystem
My blog post about how to subscribe to Forward using FreshRSS's XPath Scraping
My blog post about how to subscribe to The Far Side reruns using FreshRSS's XPath Scraping
My blog post about how to subscribe to new The Far Side content using FreshRSS's XPath Scraping
