Your First Feed: A Step-by-Step Guide

Welcome to html2rss! This guide will walk you through creating your first RSS feed. We’ll start with the easiest method and gradually introduce more powerful options.

Step 1: The “No-Config” Method (auto)

The easiest way to create a feed is with the auto command. It requires no configuration file and intelligently scrapes the page to find content.

Open your terminal and run this command:

html2rss auto https://unmatchedstyle.com/

html2rss will analyze the website and generate an RSS feed for you, printing it directly to the console. This is a great way to see if html2rss can automatically handle your target website.

Is the result not quite right? Let’s move to the next step.

Step 2: The “Full Control” Method (selectors)

When you need to extract content with precision, the selectors scraper is the tool for the job. This method gives you complete control over what content is included in your feed by using CSS selectors.

Let’s create a feed for Stack Overflow’s “Hot Network Questions”.

  1. Create a file named stackoverflow.yml.

  2. Add the following content:

    channel:
  url: https://stackoverflow.com/questions
selectors:
  items:
    selector: "#hot-network-questions > ul > li"
  title:
    selector: "a"
  url:
    selector: "a"
    extractor: "href"

  3. Run the feed command:

    html2rss feed stackoverflow.yml

This configuration tells html2rss:

  • The main container for all items is <ul id="hot-network-questions">.
  • Each item is inside a <li> tag.
  • The title of each item is the text of the <a> tag.
  • The url of each item is the href attribute of the <a> tag.

This is just the beginning! From here, you can dive deep into the full range of configuration options to create the perfect feed.