I am all for onscreen reading, and consumption of content via electronic media.
However, in my case, when I need some quick content extraction, nothing works better than p & p media: pen & paper.
The pen part is quite easy to solve, but sometimes I struggle on transforming the electronic media to paper.
More specifically, sometimes I discover some great blog, with quite a big amount of posts, that doesn’t offer any easy printing solution.
The obvious idea would be to take the blog’s RSS feed (which is offered almost always) and use any RSS reader to selectively print the desired posts.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any RSS reader with this kind of functionality (although I have to admit that at some point I became lazy and frustrated due to my poor googling skills).
While querying the net for RSS to PDF, I stumbled upon fivefilters.org.
This great webapp offers the possibility to translate any RSS feed to PDF.
However, it only processes the latest published posts, as supplied by the RSS feed.
Usually, only the latest 10 – 20 posts are offered.
After confirming that my targeted blog was a WordPress blog, I remembered that WordPress has quite nice pretty permalinks and feed options: simply provide a month in the url and the feed will return the posts of that month.
So the solution to my problem was quite simple, just invoke fivefilters.org with a different RSS url each time: once for each month.
So here is a little shell script I made that does precisely this (curl and pdftk are required for usage).
It takes the target blog url, and a start month.
It then invokes fivefilters.org once for each month, receives all the generated pdfs, and merges them in one PDF file.
The scripts only works with WordPress blogs, but I guess most other blog software offer similar RSS url queries, so the script could probably be adapted.
Now, if I could just find some time to read all this great content…
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Tags: PDF, RSS, Shell Script