If you host a feed reader (or just use one a lot), Morss is amazing

Brad Ganley@toad.work to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 67 points –
morss.it

Got the suggestion from a comment yesterday (I'll link when I find it) and I'd been using FreshRSS on it's own for a long time. Morss is a godsend for feeds that like to give you only the headline. It's also especially awesome for the Hackernews and Lobsters feeds because it will expand the posted links for you which I appreciate a great deal. Hosting it takes like 3 seconds and it's so worth it.

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FreshRSS already has web scraping abilities, and can grab the entire story for truncated feeds almost all of the time, if you add the css container class to the settings for the feed. What does Morss do beyond this?

EDIT After looking, it seems as if it does save the step of looking to see what the CSS class is. But I don't like the fact that all my RSS feeds then go through and are dependent on one single third party. Seems to somewhat defeat the point of self hosting. I'll just stick with FreshRSS alone.

EDIT AGAIN I see now that it is open source, but I still don't see value beyond what FreshRSS can already do.

Thanks for this. I've been digging into RSS after I exited Reddit was considering self hosting because most of the services I found don't do what I want. What client do you use with your FreshRSS instance for Android?

Same setup as above and on android I use FeedMe. The Freshrss web app is also very good. ReadYou is still being developed but worth keeping an eye on.

Thanks for the reply. I got FreshRSS setup yesterday and found FeedMe as well. Seems to be working well and it has enough options for the interface to keep me happy. The list view is similar enough to my old Reddit Sync browsing experience that my muscle memory doesn't have to work too hard.

I'm glad you're liking it! It's been years since I tried FeedMe. Maybe it's time I gave it another look.

To be honest, I've tried a few apps, but I tend to just use it through Firefox. Here is a screenshot on Android, in Firefox, with the Theme Mapco By: Thomas Guesnon:

I have FreshRSS setup and running good. The only thing I can't figure out is how to scrape with xpath for websites that don't have rss. As I don't know how to code in Python or whatever language you need to know for xPath. I get nothing from Google regarding this. Is there a write-up somewhere for this? Any help would be appreciated.

Cool stuff! I'm noticing that some of the RSS previews on morss.it turned out to be in Spanish or French? Would it still be in English if I added it to my RSS reader?

I don't know if I know the answer to that, honestly. I'm using my selfhosted version and haven't experienced that. You can give it a shot if you'd like at https://morss.toad.city

I've been using fivefilters for a long time and decided to give this a shot. It seems to do a decent job without some of the advanced options (ie: choosing # of items in the feed). I can't really say which one would be a better option with my limited test. Hopefully someone else who has used both can chime in.

Admittedly, I don't need anything outside of the full content of articles so I have no insight into the more advanced usage. I'm curious to see if others chime in to respond to this. Who knows, maybe I'll increase the complexity of my RSS setup

Hopefully it also works with comics sites such as Webtoons and Tapas. Those are infamous for their complex JavaScript methods to foil even Readability plugins in readers such as TTRSS.

Why don't you just get fmd2? You can just have it download the webtoons for you when new ones come out.