72 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
72 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: "Creating ebooks from your RSS feeds"
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date: 2024-08-01
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draft: false
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---
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Starting last year, I've been trying to move back to the Open Web,
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relying less and less on closed gardens and opaque technologies, and
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focusing my efforts and my online presence in open standards and small
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communities. This blog is a byproduct of that move, and me consuming
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news and information in general through RSS is another one.
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I've always enjoyed RSS. It's simple, easy to use, and back in the day
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it was **everywhere**. Every blog would have one if not multiple RSS
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feeds, every service worth their salt would generate RSS feeds for its
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content (think youtube, reddit, github...), innovation happened on top
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of the format (say podcasting) and one would end up with both a RSS
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reader full of articles to go through every day, and multiple
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automations processing updates through the format.
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Things have changed a bit, services now don't pay that much attention
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to RSS, most of them want you to use their apps to track and sell your
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information, and the fact that a huge chunk of internet revenue is
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driven by ads has forced a subset of the most obvious users of the
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format (like newspapers or even some blogs) to close their feeds,
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either by making them private or by giving you the headline of the
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article and a link to see the full content (plus ads, loads of them,
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maybe even a paywall) on their site.
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RSS is still extremely popular amongst blogs and Open Web sites tho,
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so when I started this move one of the first things I installed was
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[Miniflux](https://miniflux.app/), a fast, simple and robust RSS reader. It works great and
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allows me to read both from my computer and my mobile devices, but
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having an ebook I wanted to try and centralise my reading directly on
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that device.
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Turns out that there is a quick and easy way of creating ebooks from
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your RSS feeds using [Calibre](https://calibre-ebook.com/). You just need to export your feeds from
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your reader as an OPML file, and import them into the tool as new
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sources.
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{{< figure src="/imgs/creating-ebooks-from-your-rss-feeds/fetch-news.png" >}}
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If you have already imported your feeds, you can skip this next step,
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but the first time you follow this process or when your feeds change
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because you added or removed some, you need ot import the OPML file
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into Calibre.
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{{< figure src="/imgs/creating-ebooks-from-your-rss-feeds/import-OPML.png" >}}
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You can then configure how many articles and how far back the tool
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will go when fetching the data from your feeds. By default, the
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generated ebooks will contain up to 100 articles per feed, and the
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last seven days of content from those feeds. For me the default values
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are fine, but you can tweak them if you prefer to have a customized
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"daily newspaper" out of your feeds, for example, instead of a weekly
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one.
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{{< figure src="/imgs/creating-ebooks-from-your-rss-feeds/configure-import.png" >}}
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After the OPML import finishes, you'll find several new recipes inside
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the custom category, one per group on your feed export. To generate an
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ebook for one of them, simply select it and click the "Download now"
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button.
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{{< figure src="/imgs/creating-ebooks-from-your-rss-feeds/schedule-import.png" >}}
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When the job is completed, you should see a new book in the tool that
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you can then convert to the format you want to use, transfer to your
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device, and enjoy in gorgeous and crispy e-ink, 100% distraction free.
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