Every time I want to track some news source (or software release list) and that source offers no RSS/Atom feed, I add that missing feed myself.
For example, I wrote a feed generator that targets a specific software package release page. It scrapes the page and converts it to an Atom feed [1]. I then wrote a matching systemd service, which triggers the scraper once a day [2] and writes it to a file, no hosting required. My RSS reader is pointed to that file.
I created [1]: you put a couple of CSS selectors into a config file, push it up to GitHub, and then GitHub actions will run twice a day to update the feed, and host it on GitHub Pages.
oh this is really cool. It requires zero infrastructure on the user's part (just a github repo) and does exactly what it advertises. Great job. I'm going to start using this.
That is cool for a local feed. Have you tried it on a server?
I am able to get a lot of generally unavailable feeds using https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge running on my server. Perhaps this code could be someday brought in as a catch-all last resort.
Maintaining a server feels like a chore to me, nor am I willing to pay for cloud services as long as a local Python script (plus systemd unit plus PKGBUILD) will do.
Besides, this particular target site is extremely niche. So I figure it’s probably not worth the burden to port my code and contribute it to rss-bridge, let alone for the upstream folks to maintain it.
Fortunately Git tags are almost as good as RSS entries, it is easy to get a list of versions from somebody as long as they are creating tags in a Git repo.
There is not usually support in reader software though, so a little scripting is still required, unless they use a Git hosting platform that exposes those as RSS (GitHub and GitLab do).
For example, I wrote a feed generator that targets a specific software package release page. It scrapes the page and converts it to an Atom feed [1]. I then wrote a matching systemd service, which triggers the scraper once a day [2] and writes it to a file, no hosting required. My RSS reader is pointed to that file.
[1]: https://github.com/claui/release-feed-mediola/blob/fca39e897...
[2]: https://github.com/claui/release-feed-mediola/blob/fca39e897...