MobileRead Forums - View Single Post

illissius · 05-30-2011, 03:11 PM

I'm not quite sure where to post this; at least five different forums seem potentially relevant. Apologies if I chose wrongly.

What I would like to do:
Take all of the unread entries from a given folder in Google Reader, and transfer them to my Kindle (3) as an ebook. (If it's all mashed together and sorted chronologically, that's okay; if it's categorized by feed or something, that's also okay.)

What I have managed to accomplish:
Looking at the Google Reader API, I've been able to construct a URL which returns an Atom feed of the unread entries in a folder, sorted chronologically, just how I like it. From here I would be good to go with any number of online services which take a feed URL and convert it into an ebook (or something else which itself is convertible to an ebook), except that accessing the URL requires one to be logged in to my Google account (i.e. to have a cookie stored with the session ID). That rules out the online services, which don't support this. I can download the Atom XML file manually, and if I could convert it to HTML I could then theoretically use kindlegen to make an e-book out of it*, but ironically, it's this most straightforward-seeming step that I'm having the most trouble with.

I found kindle-feeds, and managed to make it eat a local file instead of fetching from the web, but after that still got a runtime exception from somewhere within the bowels of Hpricot and didn't have the stamina to pursue it further.

I found feed2html.py, which -- shock! -- actually works, but unfortunately in the resulting HTML output, for many feeds the content is truncated and only the titles remain. Again I did not have the stamina to dive into the guts of the code, learn its template language, and figure out how to fix this.

There's Calibre, but - yet again - its recipe system is something I don't have the time or inclination to learn how to hack.

There's NEWSTOEBOOK, which would be perfect except its 30 article limitation unfortunately makes it utterly impractical.

So. Is there any kind of ready-built solution I'm missing which could execute one or more stages of the Google Reader -> Kindle 3 pipeline, or at least convert from Atom XML into some useful, convertible-to-mobi format?

I'm using Linux, for the record.

* Though I would assume the form of the input HTML matters a great deal to the quality of the resulting output e-book... does any kind of HTML really work? Or do you need some kind of special, Kindle-optimized HTML?

05-30-2011, 03:11 PM	#1
illissius Junior Member Posts: 1 Karma: 10 Join Date: May 2011 Device: Kindle 3	Google Reader to Kindle / Atom to HTML? I'm not quite sure where to post this; at least five different forums seem potentially relevant. Apologies if I chose wrongly. What I would like to do: Take all of the unread entries from a given folder in Google Reader, and transfer them to my Kindle (3) as an ebook. (If it's all mashed together and sorted chronologically, that's okay; if it's categorized by feed or something, that's also okay.) What I have managed to accomplish: Looking at the Google Reader API, I've been able to construct a URL which returns an Atom feed of the unread entries in a folder, sorted chronologically, just how I like it. From here I would be good to go with any number of online services which take a feed URL and convert it into an ebook (or something else which itself is convertible to an ebook), except that accessing the URL requires one to be logged in to my Google account (i.e. to have a cookie stored with the session ID). That rules out the online services, which don't support this. I can download the Atom XML file manually, and if I could convert it to HTML I could then theoretically use kindlegen to make an e-book out of it, but ironically, it's this most straightforward-seeming step that I'm having the most trouble with. I found kindle-feeds, and managed to make it eat a local file instead of fetching from the web, but after that still got a runtime exception from somewhere within the bowels of Hpricot and didn't have the stamina to pursue it further. I found feed2html.py, which -- shock! -- actually works, but unfortunately in the resulting HTML output, for many feeds the content is truncated and only the titles remain. Again I did not have the stamina to dive into the guts of the code, learn its template language, and figure out how to fix this. There's Calibre, but - yet again - its recipe system is something I don't have the time or inclination to learn how to hack. There's NEWSTOEBOOK, which would be perfect except its 30 article limitation unfortunately makes it utterly impractical. So. Is there any kind of ready-built solution I'm missing which could execute one or more stages of the Google Reader -> Kindle 3 pipeline, or at least convert from Atom XML into some useful, convertible-to-mobi format? I'm using Linux, for the record. Though I would assume the form of the input HTML matters a great deal to the quality of the resulting output e-book... does any kind of HTML really work? Or do you need some kind of special, Kindle-optimized HTML? Last edited by illissius; 05-30-2011 at 03:13 PM.