Feedcake

„Gib mir ein Stück Kuchen und ich will den ganzen cake.“

The Problem

Most news platforms don’t give you the full article via rss/atom.
This wouldn’t be a big problem. But some of them do crazy 1984-ish stuff on their websites or they have built up paywalls for users with privacy addons.

Goal of this script

Getting a full-featured news feed (full articles with images) from various news pages

Benefits for the user

• They don’t need to go on the website to read the articles
• No ads
• No tracking

Possible downsides for the user

• articles don’t get updated once they are scraped
• articles arrive with some delay
• interactive/special elements in articles may not work

What it does

• Fetching the news feed from the original website
• scrape contents of new entries and save them into a directory structure
• exclude articles if a string in the ‘exclude’ list is included in the title
• save a full featured RSS file

... and what it doesn’t

• Managing when it scrapes (but install instructions for crontab are included)
• serving the feeds and assets via HTTPS (use your favorite web server for that)
• Dealing with article comments
• Archiving feeds (But content and assets - but without meta data)
• Using some sort of database (the file structure is everything)
• Cleaning up old assets
• Automatically updating the basedir if it changed.

Ugly stuff?

• the html files (feed content) get stored along the assets, even if they don’t need to be exploited via HTTPS.
• almost no exception handling yet.

How to use

• git clone this project and enter directory
• install python3, pip and virtualenv
• Create virtualenv: virtualenv -p python3 ~/.virtualenvs/feedcake
• Activate your new virtualenv: source ~/.virtualenvs/feedcake/bin/activate
• switch into the projects directory: cd feedcake
• Install requirements: pip3 install -r requirements.txt
• copy the config-example: cp config-example.json config.json.
• edit config.json
• copy the cron-example: cp cron-example.sh cron.sh.
• edit cron.sh
• make cron.sh executable: chmod +x cron.sh
• add cronjob for cron.sh: crontab -e
  • */5 * * * * /absolute/path/to/cron.sh >> /path/to/logfile 2>&1
• setup your webserver:
  • let your webserver somehow point to the feeds directory. You should protect the http path with a basic authentication.
  • let the assets_url specified in the config point to the assets directory.
• After running the script the first time, your desired feed is available at base_url/destination (e.g. https://yourdomain.tld/some-url/newspaper.xml)

TODOs

• Handle exceptions
• Decide what should happen with old news articles and assets which are not listed in the current feed anymore.