This tool's goal is to get full-text RSS feeds out of striped RSS feeds, commonly available on internet. Indeed most newspapers only make a small description available to users in their rss feeds, which makes the RSS feed rather useless. So this tool intends to fix that problem.
Morss also provides additional features, such as: .csv and json export, extended control over output. A strength of morss is its ability to deal with broken feeds, and to replace tracking links with direct links to the actual content.
Morss can also generate feeds from html and json files (see `feedify.py`), which for instance makes it possible to get feeds for Facebook or Twitter, using hand-written rules (ie. there's no automatic detection of links to build feeds). Please mind that feeds based on html files may stop working unexpectedly, due to html structure changes on the target website.
Additionally morss can grab the source xml feed of iTunes podcast, and detect rss feeds in html pages' `<meta>`.
morss accepts some arguments, to lightly alter the output of morss. Arguments are all boolean. In the different "Use cases" below is detailed how to pass those arguments to morss.
-`clip`: stick the full article content under the original feed content (useful for twitter)
-`keep`: by default, morss does drop feed description whenever the full-content is found (so as not to mislead users who use Firefox, since the latter only shows the description in the feed preview, so they might believe morss doens't work), but with this argument, the description is kept
For this, you need to make sure your host allows python script execution. This method uses HTTP calls to fetch the RSS feeds, which will be handled through `mod_cgi` for example on Apache severs.
Please pay attention to `/www/morss.py` permissions for it to be executable. Also ensure that the provided `/www/.htaccess` works well with your server.
Morss can run its own HTTP server. The later should start when you run morss without any argument, on port 8080. For now, you have to change the hardcoded port if you want to change it.
To use it, the newsreader [Liferea](http://lzone.de/liferea/) is required (unless other newsreaders provide the same kind of feature), since custom scripts can be run on top of the RSS feed, using its [output](http://lzone.de/liferea/scraping.htm) as an RSS feed.
To use this script, you have to enable "(Unix) command" in liferea feed settings, and use the command: **`[python2.7] PATH/TO/MORSS/morss.py [argwithoutvalue] [...] FEEDURL`**
`morss.process` is actually a wrapper around simpler function. It's still possible to call the simpler functions, to have more control on what's happening under the hood.
morss uses a small cache directory to make the loading faster. Given the way it's designed, the cache doesn't need to be purged each while and then, unless you stop following a big amount of feeds. Only in the case of mass un-subscribing, you might want to delete the cache files corresponding to the bygone feeds. If morss is running as a server, the cache folder is at `MORSS_DIRECTORY/cache/`, and in `$HOME/.cache/morss` otherwise.
When parsing long feeds, with a lot of items (100+), morss might take a lot of time to parse it, or might even run into a memory overflow on some shared hosting plans (limits around 10Mb), in which case you might want to adjust the different values at the top of the script.
-`MAX_TIME` sets the maximum amount of time spent *fetching* articles, more time might be spent taking older articles from cache. `-1` for unlimited.
-`MAX_ITEM` sets the maximum number of articles to fetch. `-1` for unlimited. More articles will be taken from cache following the nexts settings.
-`LIM_TIME` sets the maximum amount of time spent working on the feed (whether or not it's already cached). Articles beyond that limit will be dropped from the feed. `-1` for unlimited.
-`LIM_ITEM` sets the maximum number of article checked, limiting both the number of articles fetched and taken from cache. Articles beyond that limit will be dropped from the feed, even if they're cached. `-1` for unlimited.
The content of articles is grabbed with a [**readability** fork](https://github.com/buriy/python-readability). This means that most of the time the right content is matched. However sometimes it fails, therefore some tweaking is required. Most of the time, what has to be done is to add some "rules" in the main script file in *readability* (not in morss).
Most of the time when hardly nothing is matched, it means that the main content of the article is made of images, videos, pictures, etc., which readability doesn't detect. Also, readability has some trouble to match content of very small articles.
morss will also try to figure out whether the full content is already in place (for those websites which understood the whole point of RSS feeds). However this detection is very simple, and only works if the actual content is put in the "content" section in the feed and not in the "summary" section.
- Rewrite the readability fork, for better performances, and make it more "pythonic" (Firefox for Android may have it's own implementation, most probably cleaner than `readability.js`')
