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Old 11-12-2009, 05:32 PM   #2
jj2me
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On this page, post #838, is a basic recipe for Sports Illustrated, that I assembled with the great "add a custom news source" tool that Calibre provides (see next para.). I need to find some time to learn Python so I can improve it (customize it) and produce covers. But it's serviceable if you ignore imperfections in the retrievals.

The steps to add a custom magazine or newspaper to Calibre:
1. find the RSS feeds on the newspaper or magazine site, and hope they have full-page stories.
2. In Calibre, click the drop down arrow to the right of the Fetch News button, select "add a custom news source".
3. On the right side of the "Add custom news source" window, fill in top three items (they're for the whole recipe):
- recipe title (like "Sports Illustrated")
- oldest article (like "7 days" for a weekly magazine)
- max number of articles per feed (like "100")
4. Under "Add feed to recipe," add an RSS feed:
- Feed title (like "MLB" for the baseball RSS feed from Sports Illustrated)
- Feed URL (like http://rss.cnn.com/rss/si_mlb.rss for the Sports Illustrated MLB RSS--the post I linked to above shows the page on si.com where I got the feeds)
5. Click "+Add feed"
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 till your done adding the feeds you want.
7. On the left side of the "Add custom news source" window, click "+Add/Update recipe"
8. You're done, unless you want to tweak the Python code, in which case, on the right top, click "Switch to advanced mode" and have at it.

You'll find your new recipe under category "Custom" when you click the "Fetch news" button

You could decide to make a combined "Baseball" recipe by extracting RSS from all those sites you mentioned (yahoo, mlb, si). I just checked mlb.com, searched the home page for "RSS", saw it at the top in the "Headlines" box, clicked it, and did a right-click "Copy Link Location" to get the RSS feed for the Angels and it seems to work fine. So your custom news magazine could assemble baseball feeds from various news sites:
MLB (from si.com)
Angels (from mlb.com)
Athletics (from mlb.com)
Blue Jays (from mlb.com)
...

And for Yahoo Sports, I just did the same:
- main page: search for "RSS", found it, clicked "Subscribe to RSS News Feeds"
- clicked "MLB Team Feeds"
- right clicked each orange RSS icon and selected "Copy Link Location" for the Feed URL to give Calibre in Step 4 above.

Making the recipe is easy, as you can see, even without Python knowledge. The key is whether you're lucky enough to find good feeds. I've failed at making any auto magazine because the feeds go to multi-page stories that are linked by varying terms (like page 2's link might be "Turbo fun" instead of "Next" or "Page 2"). I think you're lucky here, and can assemble a nice baseball "multi-magazine" ("Baseball from SI, Yahoo Sports, and MLB") or separate magazines limited to baseball content.
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