|
|
NEW FAR SIDE IN FRESHRSS |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2023-03-29 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I got some great feedback to yesterday's post about using FreshRSS + XPath to |
|
|
|
subscribe to Forward, including helpful comments from FreshRSS developer |
|
|
|
Alexandre Alapetite and from somebody who appreciated it and my Far Side |
|
|
|
"Daily Dose" recipe and wondered if it was possible to get the new Far Side |
|
|
|
content in FreshRSS too. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Wait, there's new Far Side content? Yup: it turns out Gary Larson's dusted off |
|
|
|
his pen and started drawing again. That's awesome! But the last thing I want |
|
|
|
is to have to go to the website once every few... what: days? weeks? months? |
|
|
|
He's not syndicated any more so he's not got a deadline to work to! If only |
|
|
|
there were some way to have my feed reader, y'know, do it for me and let me |
|
|
|
know whenever he draws something new. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Screenshot showing new content from The Far Side in my FreshRSS reader. |
image/jpeg |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Here's my setup for getting Larson's new funnies right where I want them: |
|
|
|
* Feed URL: https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/1 |
|
|
|
This isn't a valid address for any of the new stuff, but always seems to |
|
|
|
redirect to somewhere that is, so that's nice. |
|
|
|
* XPath for finding news items: //div[@class="swiper-slide"] |
|
|
|
Turns out all the "recent" new stuff gets loaded in the HTML and then |
|
|
|
JavaScript turns it into a slider etc.; some of the CSS classes change when |
|
|
|
the JavaScript runs so I needed to View Source rather than use my browser's |
|
|
|
inspector to find everything. |
|
|
|
* Item title: concat("Far Side #", |
|
|
|
descendant::button[@aria-label="Share"]/@data-shareable-item) |
|
|
|
Ugh. The easiest place I could find a "clean" comic ID number was in a data- |
|
|
|
attribute of the "share" button, where it's presumably used for engagement |
|
|
|
tracking. Still, whatever works right? |
|
|
|
* Item content: descendant::figcaption |
|
|
|
When Larson captions a comic, the caption is important. |
|
|
|
* Item link (URL) and item unique ID: concat("https://www.thefarside.com", |
|
|
|
./@data-path) |
|
|
|
The URLs work as direct links to the content, and because they're unique, they |
|
|
|
make a reasonable unique ID too (so long as their numbering scheme is |
|
|
|
internally-consistent, this should stop a re-run of new content popping up in |
|
|
|
your feed reader if the same comic comes around again). |
|
|
|
* Item thumbnail: |
|
|
|
concat("https://fox.q-t-a.uk/referer-faker.php?pw=YOUR-SECRET-PASSWORD-GOES-HERE&referer=https://www.thefarside.com/&url=", |
|
|
|
descendant::img[@data-src]/@data-src) |
|
|
|
The Far Side uses Referer: headers as an anti-hotlinking measure, which |
|
|
|
prevents us easily loading the images directly in an RSS reader. I use this |
|
|
|
tiny PHP script as a proxy to mitigate that. If you don't have such a proxy |
|
|
|
set up, you could simply omit the "Item thumbnail" and "Item content" fields |
|
|
|
and click the link to go to the original page. |
|
|
|
* Item date: |
|
|
|
normalize-space(descendant::div[@class="tfs-comic-new__meta"]/*[1]) |
|
|
|
The date is spread through two separate text nodes, so we get the content of |
|
|
|
their wrapper and use normalize-space to tidy the whitespace up. The date |
|
|
|
format then looks like "Wednesday, March 29, 2023", which we can parse using a |
|
|
|
custom date/time format string: |
|
|
|
* Custom date/time format: l, F j, Y |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I promise I'll stop writing about how awesome FreshRSS + XPath is someday. |
|
|
|
Today isn't that day. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Meanwhile: if you used to use a feed reader but gave up when the Web started |
|
|
|
to become hostile to them and big social media systems started to wall you in, |
|
|
|
you should really consider picking one up again. The stuff I write about is |
|
|
|
complex edge-cases that most folks don't need to think about in order to |
|
|
|
benefit from RSS... but it's super convenient to have the things you care |
|
|
|
about online (news, blogs, social media, videos, newsletters, comics, search |
|
|
|
trends...) collated and sorted for you... without interference from algorithms |
|
|
|
that want to push "sticky" content, without invasive tracking or |
|
|
|
advertisements (or cookie banners or privacy popups), without something |
|
|
|
"disappearing" simply because you put off reading it for a few days. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
LINKS |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
My blog post: Subscribing to Forward using FreshRSS's XPath scraping |
|
|
 |
Alexandre Alapetite (https://alexandre.alapetite.fr) |
|
|
|
A comment on my blog from Lennon, appreciating my Forward FreshRSS recipe and asking about a Far Side "New Stuff" one |
|
|
|
My blog post about subscribing to The Far Side "Daily Dose" in FreshRSS using XPath scraping |
|
|
|
"New Stuff" on The Far Side (https://www.thefarside.com) |
|
|
|
My PHP proxy script for adding Referer: headers to bypass anti-hotlinking code (https://gist.github.com) |
|
