(Before I start: I originally sent this as a private email to TadW, Matt Jadud and TomBolini, then TadW suggested reposting it here. He also mentioned the Sitescooper project, which I’ll be sure to check out right away).

I just finished another hack you guys might be interested in.

Basically it’s a shell script that downloads the contents of a mobile version of a newspaper, in this case the Italian La Repubblica (http://www.repubblica.it/), does a bit of cleanup and copies the contents over the the iLiad’s “newspapers” folder, for convenient offline reading. Currently it works on my Mac, and assumes you have wget and growlnotify (which is a command line client to the Growl (http://growl.info/) notification system) installed on your machine under /usr/local/bin

I have set it up so that when I plug in my iLiad, through an app called Do Something When (http://www.azarhi.com/Projects/DSW/index.php) I fire a custom (one-liner) AppleScript app that fires up this script and updates my iLiad. The content of this one-liner AppleScript app is: do shell script "~/bin/repubblica-iliad.sh"

I’ve posted the source code to the shell script (http://unicoders.org/code/hacks/trunk/repubblica-iliad/repubblica-iliad.sh) and the custom icon I created for that newspaper (http://code.unicoders.org/hacks/trunk/repubblica-iliad/repubblica-flash.png).

The shell script assumes you’ve copied it in ~/lib/misc, but you can tweak the paths as needed.

Of course this is not very useful in itself if you don’t happen to like Italian newspapers :-p

But with a bit of tweaking it should be a start in developing something geared towards your favourite newspaper.

I’m attaching also two pictures of the results as shown on the iLiad.

The only thing we need is something like "Do Something When" for Windows... The rest is a piece of cake :)

Hi verbosus - nice post. Can I bug you for more information?

(Disclaimer: I think of myself as a power user, with the emphasis on user i.e. nor programmer. I write the odd automater thing, but that is it...)

First - what form is the newspaper in - are these html pages that you are converting to pdf, or is it a pdf download? Is it downloaded as part of the script process. I read the NY Times in html for example.

Second - can you put this script into a form that could be run from something like automater, so that non-programmers could use it.

Thanks - I dream of getting newspaper content onto the iLiad easily - this sounds very good!

Hi Oliver: it’s the mobile version of a newspaper website, which is basically a stripped down HTML version (you can have a look at it here (http://flash.repubblica.it/)). And yes, my shell script downloads the whole thing locally, so you can read it offline on your iLiad. It’s not a very big download anyway, I think they are ~30 HTML files plus images.

As for putting it in a non-programmer friendly format. I’m looking into that at the moment. I talked about this a bit with Matt Jadud (http://www.sububi.org/) and TadW, and I think we’ll probably set up an open source project somewhere in the following weeks. The idea is to have some kind of GUI wrapper for this kinds of scripts that people can then tweak for their favourite newspaper.

Matt has done some work with OPML/RSS integration, whereas my approach has been a little bit more brutal (download everything right away). In other words, we’ll see :-)

Oh, and by the way: on the 19th of September I will be in Eindhoven with TomBolini, to meet the iRex guys. Maybe we’ll get to talk a bit about iLiad/newspapers integration.

I’ll try to keep you posted.

Great work verbosus!

I've been asing for just this kind of software...I hope you get this up and running so we can get our greedy little hands on it.
About talking it through with iRex...be careful there. iRex is working together with several newspapers around the globe, and what you're doing is very much against what they are planning. If we can all get our favourite webnews onto our Iliads fast and easy, we won't go out there and buy their newspapers...^^

There must be a reason why more and more newspapers offer "mobile" versions of their online edition. I think what verbosus worked on here is OK in the eyes of newspapers - as long as you keep the downloaded files to yourself ;-)

Hi all,

As verbosus promised, we've opened a Google Code repository for contributing code and ideas to.

You can view the (mostly empty) repostiory at

http://iliad-fun.googlecode.com/svn/

I've checked in a README that provides a few quick guidelines, and the start of my own app for rendering OPML reading lists to the iLiad. That start represents my first Python programming effort.

The purpose here is to create cool stuff and have some fun, so drop a note if you're interested in having access and want to contribute. Details in the README.

Share and enjoy!

Hi Oliver: it’s the mobile version of a newspaper website, which is basically a stripped down HTML version (you can have a look at it here (http://flash.repubblica.it/)). ...

As for putting it in a non-programmer friendly format. I’m looking into that at the moment. I talked about this a bit with Matt Jadud (http://www.sububi.org/) and TadW, and I think we’ll probably set up an open source project somewhere in the following weeks. The idea is to have some kind of GUI wrapper for this kinds of scripts that people can then tweak for their favourite newspaper.

Matt has done some work with OPML/RSS integration, whereas my approach has been a little bit more brutal (download everything right away). In other words, we’ll see :-)

...

I’ll try to keep you posted.


Great -thanks. Matt did the nice work on the scrub-a-dub script for cleaning up the Mac files on the iLiad - see my blog (link below) for more details. So that sounds very promising. Thanks for your work on this, everyone.