Tag: miniflux

Minifux scraper rules

Posted on by Morgan

I'm following Joy of Tech comic via RSS in Miniflux but the image was never loading.

I found half a solution on this blog post of Jan-Lukas Else, unfortunately the proposed solution fails probably as a consequence of some changes in the format of Joy of Tech pages.

The fix is quite simple actually. Edit the feed settings, set the scraper rules to the following:

p.Maintext > img[src$=".png"]

And of course enable "Fetch original content" in the feed options.

And voilà, simple and beautiful.

Reading RSS in peace with a few Miniflux Hacks

Posted on by Morgan

I'm avid of content curation using RSS feeds. Let me share some of my tips here and some code. This is a living document so please come back for new tips 🙂 and explore my other articles on this topic.

Some of those tips rely on Userscripts which are snippets of code executed automatically on web pages, and usually it's very handy to customize your navigation. I'm using Tampermonkey for such needs.

Filter categories (remove empty ones) with userscript

There is by default no distinction between categories with or without content, and it can be annoying. I made a user script to remove categories with no content to read.

Source

https://gitea.zoemp.be/sansguidon/snippets/raw/branch/main/miniflux_scripts/filter_categories.js

Demo

Before applying the script, we have some categories, including one with (0) unread entries.

After

The category with (0) unread entries is hidden.

Feed organizer

This one is for grouping together all feed entries by feed/author in the main on unread, read, and starred pages. I needed this one because by default, in unread tab, the feed entries are mixed all together and I often wanna consume content per feed/author and not in chronological order.

Source

https://gitea.zoemp.be/sansguidon/snippets/raw/branch/main/miniflux_scripts/feed_organizer.js

Demo

Fetch original content

This is a trick that works well with the majority of feeds so you can fetch the whole article content in your reader instead of just the excerpt.

Filter feed entries by title / content

I've customize the feed settings to exclude specific keywords, and on top of this I've also global rules which apply to all feeds, for excluding feed entries when keywords are found in their content or title. This makes it easy to exclude clickbait uninteresting or depressing content 🙂

My current setting is here as an example https://gitea.zoemp.be/sansguidon/snippets/raw/branch/main/miniflux/block.rules (RSS)

In this case I follow news with heavy metal album releases and I'm excluding specific genre like Death Metal. I'm also abusing the feature to avoid being spammed with recurrent news like Olympic games (Paris 2024). Finally there are already many reasons for me to be anxious, and I do not need more. The last rule saves me from the useless negative news. I keep fine tuning the list and I could improve this by including terms from public blacklists, like this.

Startup options

You can override Miniflux behavior with some environment variables. See https://miniflux.app/docs/configuration.html for more configuration options.

Those are mine and make Miniflux more indulgent to unstable RSS feeds.

export HTTP_CLIENT_TIMEOUT=60
export POLLING_PARSING_ERROR_LIMIT=6

Last updated: Sept 5, 2024 around 9:51 AM CEST in 🗺️ Brussels, Belgium.

Effective content curation

Posted on by Morgan

I went up with this workflow that seem to pass the test of time and I'm sharing it with you :

  • I'm using ChatGPT » Summarize & Chat extension for Brave/Chromium (browsers) in order to save time at scrolling long articles in my inbox.
  • I'm not subscribing to any newsletter, everything is read through MiniFlux (RSS curator. If you don't know about that, read -> what is RSS?), combined with RSS-Bridge and ChangeDetection, all self-hosted. For any newsletter that cannot be replaced with RSS feed, I rely on my hero https://kill-the-newsletter.com/.
  • I edit my Feed titles with emojis expressing how I feel about their interest : 😕 (Boring?) 😃 (Joyful read) etc.
  • I categorize feeds and label them also with emojis and sort them from the best to the worst. Those visuals clues really help. When I see nothing interesting for a while in any RSS I've subscribed to, I remove it from Miniflux.
  • I'm customizing my RSS curation in Miniflux through some hacks.
  • I manage to keep a maximum of 20/30 RSS feeds of interest. Among those, I find maybe 5 to be absolutely fantastic and I'm even sharing them in my /links section.
  • I've configured Tampermonkey browser extension to take control of the rendering of my RSS feeds list and replace the whole page with "FOCUS", at least 80% of time.
  • Something too long to read but that looks interesting is immediately dropped from Miniflux and shared/saved into Wallabag (bookmark management) for later read. The goal is to declutter my subscriptions inbox.
  • Articles I browser randomly and are already saved in Wallabag are saved with tags like "x2" if it's second time I save them, "x3" if it's the third save I save them, etc.
  • If I find any image or PDF of interest, I save them locally to my Dropbox folder of interest. I have a folder for Books, which is subject to automatic triage with some scripting, also my ePubs are automatically converted to PDF. Duplicate files are moved to subfolders like "x2" if it's second time I save the same book, "x3" if it's third time, etc.
  • Everything in Wallabag is automatically labelled based on keywords. I don't waste anytime adding manual labels. If a label is missing, it means an automation is missing in my Wallabag auto-tagging rules.
  • I keep a maximum of 10 5 podcasts I'm subscribed to in Spotify. In the end I dream to only subscribe to a dozen of RSS feeds but that's probably very optimistic.
  • I want to take time for whatever is worth reading, and skip the rest fast.
  • Whatever is not worth is submitted to shrinking.

Last updated: August 20, 2024 around 16:20 PM CEST in 🗺️ Brussels, Belgium.