Feedmaker: URL + CSS Selectors = Rss Feed
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
feedmaker.fly.devTechstory
calmpositive
Debate
40/100
Rss FeedsWeb ScrapingCSS Selectors
Key topics
Rss Feeds
Web Scraping
CSS Selectors
Feedmaker is a tool that generates RSS feeds from any website using CSS selectors, sparking discussion on its potential applications and limitations.
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- 01Story posted
Sep 19, 2025 at 5:14 PM EDT
4 months ago
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Sep 19, 2025 at 5:55 PM EDT
41m after posting
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Sep 23, 2025 at 2:03 PM EDT
4 months ago
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ID: 45306701Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 5:11:42 PM
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The bad news: so did the 503 page.
Did load eventually for me, thought it was broken as no styles but looks like it's intentional.
And the GitHub url (hopefully easy to host your own instance): https://github.com/kevinschaul/feedmaker
Edit: The catch is the 10ms CPU cap per request - you'd need a super lean implementation. Django's too heavy for that.
Has anyone tested to see if it works with Blogtrottr which will email you whenever there's a new item in an RSS feed?
Just since this doesn't seem like it even includes a date field in the RSS? And of course no guid. So I'm wondering how compatible it winds up being.
The few times I actually tried it, it worked badly, with huge chunks of text content missing from the page. Makes me wonder if with modern web the task has became so difficult even a browser couldn't pull it off, or if they just wasn't trying to do a good job with the feature.
59 requirements, including Django, seems pretty heavy though?
For my own RSS feed, I use this 48 line Python file with no dependencies outside the standard library:
https://github.com/no-gravity/atomfeed.py
It takes an array with the entries as input, not a web page. But I guess the HTML parsing should take no more than another few lines? For HTML parsing, I have good experiences with the lxml module which is in the Debian repos. It is fast and works pretty well.
I always love removing dependencies and simplifying software. I will try and switch to a simpler implementation like yours, thanks for sharing!
Oh, and is you brother coming to the party?
Handled most things nicely, but I found a few sites where I wanted multiple selections to be combined into one document.
I emailed the result to myself, turning any images into attachments; this meant my “feed reader” had read/unread tracking that synced across devices, some html support, folders, offline viewing, etc.