Recommendations requested for offline forum reading

[deanstow]

Hello,

I have just purchased a PRS300 to replace my ebookwise 1150 (?) which I am giving to my wife to replace her REB1100.

My PRS300 has not arrived yet but I am excited at the possibilities.

Converting content to IMP was often a pain and fraught with errors and problems.

I am hoping someone can recommend software or methods to accomplish the capturing and converting of forum posts for offline reading (bedtime, lunchtime, etc.).

I realize that it can be as simple as:

1. Open the website
2. Ctrl+A (select all)
3. Ctrl+C (copy to clipboard)
4. Open Word
5. Ctrl+V (copy from clipboard)
6. Save
7. Convert
8. Rinse and Repeat

However, I am looking for a little more. I would love to find some software that intelligently strips repetitive information such as post count, ranking, and signatures.

In trying to do it manually, I find myself in a position that I might as well have read it at my computer for the amount of time I spent preparing the ebook files.

I am concerned that a simple offline web browser is inadequate because of difficulty in picking depth of link retrieval or limitations on domain.

Here are links to some of the forums I am interested in downloading content from...

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/
http://forum.egosoft.com/
http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/

I have noticed several possibilities listed on this site but I am hoping that someone has some experience to share in what would be most useful for me.

Any suggestions and experience will be appreciated.

If worst comes to worst, I may try to write a utility to do some of these things but I don't want to invest that time if someone has already crossed that bridge.

By the way, this is my first post. I have been a lurker off and on and appreciate the opinions here as they helped me decide upon the PRS300 as my new device. (I hope I like it as much when it gets here as I think I will.) This seems to be a friendly and warm community.

Thanks for all you have done so far and I hope to be a contributor in the future.

Dean

[pilotbob]

I think the best way would be to use Calibre to pull the forum posts down using the RSS feeds that the forum provides.

BOb

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

I think the best way would be to use Calibre to pull the forum posts down using the RSS feeds that the forum provides.

BOb

AFAIK, most forums don't provide RSS feeds for their discussion threads. (Is there a way to get a feed of "all the discussions with new posts in the Reading Recommendations folder?")

I have the same issue with LiveJournal--I want to throw posts & comments on my Reader in the morning, and read them on the train & at lunch. A feed of just the posts is pretty much useless; most of the posts, like the posts here, are intended as conversation-starters, not news articles.

I don't think there's any software that automatically removes the "junk" or repeated parts in forum posts. (In forums like this one, there's not even a way to get all the posts on a topic on a single page.) This is partially because there are so many forum arrangements and a method would have to be designed for each forum layout, and partially because the idea of taking your web content offline has always been troublesome for some people.

[deanstow]

Thanks for the replies.

Forums with RSS feeds would be be great... I think I will request that that feature be added or turned on. (Can't hurt to ask!)

For anyone else following this thread, I do some things that I failed to mention in the the original post.

If you can customize your view of the forums, turn off signatures and make the displayed post count very large. These steps reduce the number of separate saves you have to do.

If possible, view a 'printable' version of the thread. This reduces the 'clutter' of the normal web page.

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

AFAIK, most forums don't provide RSS feeds for their discussion threads. (Is there a way to get a feed of "all the discussions with new posts in the Reading Recommendations folder?")

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/rss.php

BOb

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/rss.php

BOb

I think I misspoke, and asked for the wrong thing. Is there a way to get posts and replies by rss feed? (Or any other method, short of copying-and-pasting each individual discussion one page at a time?) I have no interest in reading a list of discussion topics without access to the discussions themselves. The feed doesn't even say if there are replies to the posts.