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Any way to automate news compilation (rss feeds, websites, etc.) daily?

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40hz:
There was a web service some years back that did exactly what you are describing, but it disappeared one day without warning or explanation. Can't remember the name of it off the top of my head.

For your project you might want to take a look at MyRSS which is about as barebones an aggregator as you'll find anywhere. Basically it's a Python script that takes a textfile of URL links to various feeds and produces an XHTML page. The authors point out you could create a CSS file to pretty-format it or whatever. It could be set up using a scheduler (or chron on Linux) to run it once per day to gather the content. From there you'd need a (AHK maybe?) script to open it in a browser, and then print it to a PDF via something like BullzipPDF or Ghostscript. And that should do it.

It's a little Rube Goldberg-ey. But it should work.

The have an example output page of what it produces so you can take a look and see if it gets you at least near where you want to go. Find it here.

Luck! :Thmbsup:

superboyac:
aignes, thanks!  I'll check that feature out and see what I can get.

40hz, I'll check out that MyRSS as well.  It seems like the hardest trick is to get the actual article content and not just the rss summary.  I'm sure I can come up with theories why the service you mentioned disappeared...without a trace!  >:(

40hz:
They were probably "asked" to stop doing it since it cut into ad revenues for the sites it was getting the feeds from. Ads are one reason why so many sites no longer provide full text in their feeds. (Although that doesn't excuse them making you land on two seperate ad pages before they let you get to the ad strewn article page either.) There was one other site (Feedbook?) that did a download/PDF thing too, but it's not the one I'm thinking of - and they also discontinued that part of their service. I do remember reading about it on Lifehacker. But I can't see the point of going back something like four years to find the article. Especially since its now moot.

Guess if you still want something like that you're going to have to kludge up your own.

I used to go into NYC a couple of days a week to handle a contract client. I loved having my little personal newspaper with me those mornings on the metrorail in.
 ;D

superboyac:
They were probably "asked" to stop doing it since it cut into ad revenues for the sites it was getting the feeds from. Ads are one reason why so many sites no longer provide full text in their feeds. (Although that doesn't excuse them making you land on two seperate ad pages before they let you get to the ad strewn article page either.) There was one other site (Feedbook?) that did a download/PDF thing too, but it's not the one I'm thinking of - and they also discontinued that part of their service. I do remember reading about it on Lifehacker. But I can't see the point of going back something like four years to find the article. Especially since its now moot.

Guess if you still want something like that you're going to have to kludge up your own.

I used to go into NYC a couple of days a week to handle a contract client. I loved having my little personal newspaper with me those mornings on the metrorail in.
 ;D
-40hz (February 10, 2012, 11:20 AM)
--- End quote ---
Sigh...copyright and ads.  These two things take all the pleasure out of life AND they are holding all sorts of creativity back.  Ok, looks like I need to frankenstein it myself.  Yeah, having a custom newspaper is a pretty cool thing.  I KNOW a lot of people would love that.  Imagine waking up in the morning and having all your website articles and blogs all packaged nicely in a pdf on your tablet, very clean, no ads, no clicking around endlessly.  Do we really have to wait 10 years until people figure out how to work in the copyright laws into something like that?  I mean, the technology has been here for 10 years already.

daddydave:
I've only used the (Palm OS and) Windows Mobile version, but I have used things like Plucker and iSilo/iSilox for this purpose. These don't produce a PDF, there was a desktop component to download and format the content and a mobile component app for the viewer.  Plucker is freeware but unfortunately it seems to have stopped development over a decade ago. (The Windows Mobile spinoff was called Vade Mecum, the best tool to create those Plucker documents on the desktop was called Sunrise XP.) iSiloX is multiplatform and actively developed, although I think the iOS version didn't get good reviews, and the iOS desktop sync probably doesn't work as well on that platform, don't know about Android. You could set up a schedule for each item, tell each item to shrink or remove images, etc., and it would work with both RSS feeds and web pages. For RSS feeds that showed partial content, you could specify a link depth to fetch, although usually it was better to just fetch the web page in that case. iSilo really had far superior rendering to Plucker (which was freeware and seems to be no longer developed), it preserved indent levels and colors nicely so you can look at things like formatted code listings.

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