💾 Archived View for danq.me › posts › forward-comic-freshrss-xpath captured on 2023-07-22 at 16:19:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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2023-03-28
As I've mentioned before, I'm a fan of Tailsteak's Forward comic. I'm not a fan of the author's weird aversion to RSS, so I hacked a way around it first using an exploit in webcomic reader app Comic Chameleon (accidentally getting access to comics weeks in advance of their publication as a side-effect) and later by using my own tool RSSey.
But now I'm able to use my favourite feed reader FreshRSS to scrape websites directly - like I've done for The Far Side - I should switch to using this approach to subscribe to Forward, too:
/2023/03/freshrss-xpath-forwardcomic.png
Here's the settings I came up with -
/2023/03/freshrss-xpath-forwardcomic-explanation.png
I continue to love this "killer feature" of FreshRSS, but I'm beginning to see how it could go further - I wish I had the free time to contribute to its development!
I'd love to see a mechanism for exporting/importing feed configurations like this so that I could share them more-easily, for example. I'd also be delighted if I could expand on my XPath rules to load pages referenced by the results and get data from them, too, e.g. so I could use an image found by XPath on the "item link" page as the thumbnail image! These are things RSSey could do for me, but FreshRSS can't... yet!
My blog post promoting Forward as it reached episode #100
My blog post about hacking Comic Chameleon
My RSSey code to turn Forward Comic into an RSS feed
My blog post about using FreshRSS's XPath feature to subscribe to my friend Beverley's weblog
My blog post about using FreshRSS's XPath scraping to subscribe to The Far Side
