Okay, so I got really tired of how messy getting news felt. You know, websites screaming at you, pop-ups everywhere. I just wanted the headlines, maybe a quick read, without all the fuss.
First thing I did was think, maybe I can just pull the text I want? I started messing around with trying to grab stuff directly from web pages. Man, that was a headache. Every time a site changed its look, my little setup would break. Spent more time fixing it than reading anything.
Finding a better way
Then I stumbled upon RSS feeds. Remember those? Turns out, lots of sites still use them. It’s way cleaner, just structured data. So I thought, okay, let’s try this instead. Much simpler.
I put together a really basic script. Nothing fancy. The goal was just to fetch the latest titles from a couple of blogs I follow. I’d just run it from my command line whenever I felt like checking for updates.
- Grabbed the feed URL.
- Pulled the latest items.
- Printed the titles.
That was it initially. Super barebones.
Making it a bit more useful
Running it was fine, but sometimes I wanted to save an article to read later, maybe offline. So, I added a little feature. After seeing the headlines, I could type in the number of the one I was interested in. The script would then try to fetch the main text of that article and save it as a plain text file on my computer. Stripped out all the ads and sidebars, just the words.
Also, having the feed URLs hardcoded in the script was annoying. I changed it so it reads the list of feeds from a separate, simple text file. Made it way easier to add new sources or remove old ones without touching the script itself. Just edit the list, run the script, done.
Hitting some bumps
It wasn’t all smooth sailing. Some feeds were formatted weirdly, or sometimes a site would be down. My script would just stop, throw an error. Had to add some checks, you know, try to catch those problems and just skip that feed if it’s acting up, instead of crashing the whole thing.
Duplicate articles were another small annoyance if a site updated its feed entry slightly. Added a basic check to see if I’d already saved an article with a very similar title recently.
The result?
So now, I’ve got this little personal news thing going. I run my script, see the new stuff from my chosen spots, pick what I want to read, and get a clean text file. No browser needed most of the time. It’s not gonna win any awards, it’s rough, but it does exactly what I wanted. Cuts out the noise. That’s my little system.
