"Active feeds": feed reader for sites that do not offer Atom/RSS

[Ambrevar]

Feed readers are great for many reasons, to name a few:

• They enable offline reading.
• They tend to be low on resources compared to regular browsing (no CSS / JavaScript)
• They present documents in a uniform fashion.

Now the drawback of Atom/RSS:

• It does not work of the website does not offer it. And feeds popularity has waned dramatically in the last decade...
• Many feeds only offer links or trimmed content.
• Many feeds do not offer entries older than just a few months.

Now here is an idea: what if we offered a database of scrapers for popular websites with no or poor-quality feeds to fill the holes? For instance, a relatively simple scraper could parse Reddit feeds to include the body of the post instead of just a link. We could also add extras, for instance the Reddit comments which could be manually refreshed.

I'm surely not the first one to think about this, but I wonder if there is a project that has already taken a universal approach to this. A few domain-specific scrapers are listed at https://farside.link/.

[aadcg]

We just investigate how gwene handles Reddit.

[aadcg]

A great topic for a Nyxt extension.