Classic Automatic Webblog conversion to epub by Calibre

[bthoven]

Calibre is a great freeware for ebook library, ebook conversion, and offline newsfeeds.

I usually use Calibre to automatically download news feeds, covert them to ebook, and ready to be uploaded to my Nook every night. However, those news feeds source must be either .rss, or .xml format.

I have quite a number of web blogs (with photos) which I want Calibre to work like the news feeds; but so far Calibre does not support scheduled web-to-epub conversion.

However, Calibre has a lot of hidden and powerful tools which allow me to do it, though, without friendly user interface. Calibre has the following commands:

web2disk.exe
ebook-convert.exe

For example, I wish to convert the following web blog to epub every Monday night because Uncle Rod usually writes a new blog on Sunday (Thanks uncle!):

http://uncle-rods.blogspot.com

This web blog is a simple page with photos and I want to have only this web page in my Nook as an epub book. What I need is two command lines from Calibre, and windows scheduler.

Here are the command lines I use:

start web2disk http://uncle-rods.blogspot.com -r 0 |more
start ebook-convert index.xhtml unclerod.epub --authors "Rod Mollise" --author-sort "Mollise, Rod" --cover "http://skywatch.brainiac.com/astroland/rodnow.jpg" --level1-toc //h:h2 --no-chapters-in-toc

The first command will save the web page to my local disk (-r 0 means save only this page, don't retrieve the link pages)

The second command will convert the saved web page to an epub book named unclerod.epub. The command also puts the author name, and cover photo into the book automatically.

I create a DOS batch file containing these two commands, e.g. unclerod.bat

I then use Scheduled Task function in Windows Control Panel to schedule this unclerod.bat file to run every Monday night.

Every Monday night, after leaving Calibre on my PC to retrieve all enews, I just plug my Nook to my PC to let Calibre automatically upload my enews, and I'll also copy this unclerod.epub file to My Document folder.

That's all I would like to share. Hope you'll enjoy reading on your Nook more.

For more information about these two commands:

web2disk: http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual...light=web2disk
ebook-convert: http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual...to-epub-output

Thanks Kovid, Terisa de Morgan, and beowulf573 (Eddie) for your help on this.

[ctos]

thanks for sharing.

Another approach is collect your favorite RSS feeds in google reader then use Calibre embedded google reader download tool to download content periodically. The downloaded content is in ePub format and can be read Nook comfortably.

[bthoven]

Thanks ctos.

I'm not sure I understand you correctly because my post is talking about webpages, not rss feeds.