Dan Q

Day: 16 July 2024

SkiFreeeeeeee

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

Rob Vincent said:

COME PLAY SOLITAIRE WITH US.

A screenshot of Windows 95's Solitaire program into which a bunch of surreal changes have been photoshopped. Suit pips and card numbers and letters are swapped around in impossible ways, the ocean from the beach-based card back design is leaking onto the playfield, and the text all warped and jumbled nightmarishly. The Windows title bar says "Solitolitololoreee".

I always preferred SkiFree!

A screenshot of SkiFree running in Windows 3.1 with a bunch of quirky edits. The window is warped to include a "Shroom Supply" with lots of mushroms, a sign advertises bagels, a helicopter has landed, two monsters are let's-say hugging on the ground, and the score box states Age, Sex, Location and Star Sign. The title of the window is "SkiFreeeeeeee".

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Vmail via FreshRSS

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.

Signup form for VMail from Vole.WTF
Sure, I could have used my selfhosted OpenTrashMail server to convert email into RSS, but I figured XPath scraping would be more-elegant…

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.

Screenshot showing VMail subscription in FreshRSS
I’m not a monster: I want Vmail’s stats to be accurate. So I signed up with an unmonitored OpenTrashMail account as well. I just don’t read it (except for the confirmation link email). It actually took me a few attempts because there seems to be some kind of arbitrary maximum length validation on the signup form. But I got there in the end.

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.

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