Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
Any way to automate news compilation (rss feeds, websites, etc.) daily?
rjbull:
I never used RSS much for work, but had most of the other irritations. One site was so full of ads, most of them animated, that I had to use Adblock Plus to be able to read it at all. That is, the ads made it near-impossible to read the content of what was supposed to be one of the industry's leading journals. Pointless and self-defeating; I wouldn't have viewed the site at all if I didn't really need to. Another of the review sites insisted on splitting up its items into bite-sized bits on separate Web pages and I had to keep clicking for the next page, clipping what I needed and merging all the clips into one. No wonder it took me the equivalent of a whole day a week to assemble the material for the current awareness bulletin. I couldn't have done it without WebSite-Watcher.
superboyac:
I wonder if there is a way automatically 'scrape' the good content from a website and use that to create a pdf. I know website-watcher can catch certain things, but I doubt aignes will partake in any kind of scraping activity. I know there are tools like dtsearch that sound like they can do some things like this.
Do you guys know of any tool that can be trained to extract text that matches a certain pattern from a website (to just get the article content and leave the other stuff out) and then sent to a text file or something for printing?
rjbull:
WSW usually ignores graphics, so it should ignore many ads. It looks like Check&Get Pro is a step closer (but still no cigar). It can e-mail a copy of the text with the changes highlit, and ignore ads. But no mention of PDF. I think Darwin is a Check&Get user - at least, somebody on DC is.
superboyac:
I found some other tools.
But they seem...shady.
aignes:
Something like website-watcher that collects all these feeds and prints it to a pdf file every morning for me. Then I go grab the pdf and just read that. Automated. Is anything like this possible? It's like your own custom newspaper delivered each morning.
--- End quote ---
WSW is not able to create a PDF file, but you can create a HTML report that contains found changes (Tools + Report/Export). You can also automate the report via the scripting language, an example can be found at http://www.aignes.com/wswhelp/help_script_examplecreateandsendreport.htm
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