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       VMAIL VIA FRESHRSS
       
       2024-07-16
       
       It's time for... Dan Shares Yet Another FreshRSS XPath Scraping Recipe!
       
       VMAIL
       
       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.
       
   IMG 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.
       
   IMG Screenshot showing VMail subscription in FreshRSS
       
       RECIPE
       
       Want to subscribe to Vmail using your own copy of FreshRSS? Here's the
       settings you're looking for -
       * Type of feed source: HTML + XPath (Web scraping)
       * XPath for finding news items: //table/tbody/tr
       It's just a table with each row being a newsletter; simple!
       * XPath for item title: descendant::a
       * XPath for item content: .
       * XPath for item link (URL): descendant::a/@href
       * XPath for item date: descendant::td[1]
       * Custom date/time format: d M *y
       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.
       * XPath for unique item ID: descendant::th
       Optional, but each issue's got its own unique ID already anyway; we might as
       well use it!
       * Article CSS selector on original website: #vmail
       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.
       
       LINKS
       
  HTML My blog post announcing how valuable FreshRSS's XPath Scaping feature is
  HTML FreshRSS
  HTML My blog note about my FreshRSS addiction
  HTML A 2019 blog post about my digital ecosystem
   DIR My blog post about how to subscribe to Forward using FreshRSS's XPath Scraping
   DIR My blog post about how to subscribe to The Far Side reruns using FreshRSS's XPath Scraping
   DIR My blog post about how to subscribe to new The Far Side content using FreshRSS's XPath Scraping
   DIR I could have used my selfhosted OpenTrashMail server
  HTML Vmail
  HTML My blog post about ARCC by vole.wtf.